Tomoko Arai, Recon team, 6th January 2013, Szabo Bluff

Though it has been a bit windy these last two days, we did go out for meteorite search on several blue ice fields around Szabo Bluff. We are glad that fourteen meteorites were recovered yesterday, and one beautiful large carbonaceous chondrite today. What annoyed us while searching are black terrestrial rocks (probably meta-sedimentary rocks), which are everywhere and look very similar to meteorites in shape and color. These black rocks were present along with other white granitic rocks in the most icefields. It was time consuming and paintaking for us to carefully check them, so that we would not miss any meteorites. We completed searching the blue ice fields around our campsite today. Tomorrow, we hope to move to the next campsite, about 20 miles south from here, if the weather permits. Have a wonderful day!

The picture shows the granite hills of Price Bluff close to our camp, and a glacial moraine rock-field with granitic boulders and some of the annoying meteorite-look-alike rocks.

PS. From Katie – congratulations Ruth and Kofi on getting engaged! Lovely news to hear, and hope that you both had a great holiday Happy Birthday to Christian who was on ANSMET last year, and Graeme and Hannah back home – hope you all celebrate well.

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Stan Love, G-058 Larkman Nunatak Camp 2013 January 5

Every Scott tent in every field camp in Antarctica has a chandelier hanging from the apex. Here is a picture of ours.

The photo may be a bit hard to interpret. Recall that the Scott tent is shaped like a pyramid about eight feet on a side. The pointed top of the tent is where the vents are located, and where all the heat from the stove rises to. It can get quite warm up there, 70 or 80 degrees Fahrenheit. The floor is usually around freezing. Generations of Scott tent inhabitants have figured out that the top of the tent is the place to put anything that you want to keep warm. Newer and better versions of the tent include some tether points and a nice built-in clothesline near the top to hang things from.

It’s not enough.

We’ve had to add two additional clotheslines to handle all the stuff we want to keep warm. It’s a long list, as you might guess from the picture. It includes: 1. our Bunny Boots, which are quite warm but also impervious to water vapor, so your feet get saturated with sweat when wearing them for hours at a time. If you don’t dry your boots thoroughly every night, they rapidly become unapproachable. 2. our work socks, inner and outer layers, which also need airing and drying for the same reason. 3. gloves. 4. laundered underwear that needs to be dried. 5. tomorrow morning’s juice boxes, which are undrinkable little bricks unless thawed. 6. honey and pancake syrup, also unusable until thawed. 7. goggles, which get iced up with condensation from your breath and need to be heated and dried. 8. neck gaiters, for the same reason. 9. washcloths and wet wipes. 10. canned fruit for future consumption, inedible until thawed. and various and sundry similar items.

A close look at the picture, which was taken shortly before Christmas, will reveal another item: the turkey for the holiday feast. Yes, for five days before Christmas we had a fourteen-pound turkey suspended from our tent roof, defrosting in the warm environment there. Actually it ended up being *too* warm, and we had to find a slightly cooler spot to defrost the turkey without spoiling it. Another item suspended for defrosting, a package of steaks, developed a leak which led to my teammate’s Lovecraftian experience detailed a few blog entries ago. After that horror, we double-bag anything hung in the top of the tent that could possibly leak.

Katie Joy, Recon Team, 4th January 2013, Szabo Bluff

The recon team are back in the meteorite searching game. With style I might add. We have had two tent days as it was a snowing and a blowing, with some white out conditions. This morning it was still a bit hazy, but cleared up very well through the day to give us nice clear skies, and we searched a very large blue icefield not far from camp. We managed to collect 15 meteorites (see the photo of one of our finds on the blue ice), which is the recon team’s best day count so far, including one or two rarer carbonaceous chondrite types. A satisfying day of work, and we are all properly pooped out and looking forward to crawling into our sleeping bags to start work again in the morning.

P.S. Hello and Happy New Year and hello to everyone in SEAES at the University of Manchester. Hope that you are all well, and Nat hope that the Moon is treating you well

Rob Coker, January 3rd 2013, Larkman Nunatak

Since my mother (hi, mom!) asked the other day about clothes down here, I thought I’d write a bit about how we not only stay safe from the cold but also from overheating. This balancing of hot and cold is called thermostatting. To keep one’s body temperature (or thermostat) not too hot and not too cold can be tricky when one is working out in a cold environment like Antarctica.

Everyone ends up with their own solution to this, though it is possible to just use the extreme cold weather (ECW) gear issued to us at the Clothing Distribution Center (CDC). Most of us use a mixture of ECW and personal gear. The figure shows what I have been using on ‘moderate’ cold days (say, -15 degrees C and 15 kt winds). On my legs I am wearing 4 layers: a silk underwear layer (my own) then a moderate cloth layer and a thick fleece layer (both from CDC). My outside layer are ski pants; CDC gives an overall type garment that I find doesn’t fit me very well. I am wearing 3 pairs of socks: poly pro, woollite, then thick wool. Over this goes the hefty ‘bunny boots’ which are rubber and very toasty. For my chest I have: a silk shirt (mine), a normal wicking shirt, a moderate cloth layer, a poly pro shirt, a thin fleece shirt, then a fleece jacket. Over this in the picture is ‘little red’, a thin windbreaker from CDC. When it is colder, we use ‘big red’, a nice warm parka. On my hands I wear glove liners under wool mittens (as on one hand in the picture) and when it is really cold I add the CDC ‘bear paws’ (as seen on the other hand). I usually have a chemical hand warming packet in there too. On my head, I have a balaclava (not the issued one, but it is very similar), a fleece hat, and a neck gaiter. The ‘reds’ have hoods which fit around my paintball goggles. As I said, everyone goes for something different, partly depending on what personal gear they brought and their personal preferences.

Back to thermostatting: as we work out in the wind and cold, our body heat goes up. Or perhaps the wind dies down. Or clouds uncover the sun (since the sunlight bounces off of the snow and ice, it effectively warms you twice as much, so your sunlit side could be toasty while your unlit side, if the upwind side too, can be quite chilly). It is nearly as bad to start sweating here as it is to feel cold. Even with smart fabrics, sweat will tend to not make it to the surface of your clothing and therefore some layer will get heavy and wet and start eventually making you cold. So one has to regulate carefully what layers you have on to make sure you do not overheat (to prevent any sweating at all). The easiest solution is usually to unzip your jacket(s) and face the wind. In my case, I also have to move my gaiter up and down from my goggles to make sure my lenses don’t fog up as I change temperatures (which can happen just by turning into the wind!).

We don’t bring many changes of clothing, to keep supplies to a minimum. Which means wearing some of these clothes (the outer layers) the whole time we’re out here! The layers next to our skin we switch out every week or so and give them a quick cleaning in a small tub of warm water, though some of us (not me!) don’t even do that. .

Tomoko Arai, Recon team, 2nd January 2013, Szabo Bluff

Happy new year to all (^0^)v In contrast to the beautiful weather yesterday and the day before yesterday, it was snowy and windy today. Again, we stayed all day in the tent. Since we only have less than three weeks to go, I hope the weather recovers soon. So far, we (the recon team) have collected thirty three meteorites in total. As a new-year wish for finding more samples, I would like to write a bit about the types of meteorites I am interested in and the reason why. Studies of meteorites have provided basic understanding on extraterrestrial bodies including their origin and evolution, as well as informing ground-based telescopic observations and data from space exploration. Mineralogical, chemical and isotopic data of variable classes of meteorites obtained by laboratory measurements have set a framework for understanding the evolution of the Solar System, although parent bodies for meteorites are generally hard to define except specific meteorite types, such as ones from the Moon and Mars. Accordingly, our current understanding of the Solar System is dependent on the meteorite samples currently available. Yet, the current meteorite collection does not include meteorite types matching the remote sensing data of planetary exploration missions such as those from Venus and Mercury (see the Katie’s blog dated Dec. 27). There are also some meteorites that we have in our collection that originate from small planetary bodies (i.e., proto-planets or asteroids) that experienced melting to form an iron core, a mantle and a crust in a process known as magmatic differentiation, and yet at the present day we cannot well match the particular body from which they were sourced. Additionally there are some other types of meteorites that reveal just one detail of a parent body’s melting and magmatic history, but do not reveal its complete history. These meteorites are known as “ungrouped” or “unclassified” types, because their mineralogy and chemistry do not match any other known type of meteorites – they are unique. Such meteorites are extremely important, providing insights to the diversity of planetary evolution processes in the Solar System. In fact, some of these types of ungrouped meteorites have been found here in the Graves Icefields, i.e., GRA 06128/06129, which were collected during the 2006 ANSMET field season in a locality less than twenty miles away. I do hope that we could possibly encounter such types of ungrouped meteorites, which may lead us to a more complete view of the Solar System history. The picture was taken on the top of Szabo Bluff on December 31st, 2012.

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Mini Wadhwa, ANSMET Systematic Search Team, Larkman Nunatak, January 2, 2013

The beginning of the New Year is usually a time for reflection and making lists. Since we have a tent day today (see photo of the whiteout conditions in camp earlier today), this is exactly what I set out to do for today’s blog post.

My experience with the ANSMET program is somewhat unique. Like many others before me, I happen to be an ANSMET veteran. However, what makes my experience different from that of other ANSMET veterans is that I happen to have the biggest “delta T” between my trips to the ice. More specifically, the last time I was part of an ANSMET team was exactly 20 years ago, when I was only a third-year graduate student at Washington University in St. Louis! I count that experience among the high points of my life. I would have been back sooner but for my professional and personal circumstances that conspired to make it unfeasible until now. In any case, in keeping with the tradition of reflection and making lists at the start of the New Year, I reflect back on my experience of twenty years ago and give you my list of top 10 favorite things about the ANSMET 2012-13 season compared to the 1992-93 season:

#10: Reliable (and fast!) skidoos. Given that I have trouble keeping to speed limits in my normal life (believe me, I have the speeding tickets to prove it!), I certainly appreciate the fastness of the Skandic skidoos that are our workhorses here. But more than anything else, it is the ability to start these beasts up with a minimum of fuss each morning that makes them so endearing compared to the older models of twenty years ago.

#9: A skidoo fueling station with a manual fuel pump (the beloved “hurdy-gurdy”!). I still remember (with fear and loathing) the awkward jerry cans and funnels that we had used to fuel our skidoos in the days of old!

#8: Wooden flooring planks for the Scott tents, which keep our tent floors level and much better insulated against the cold.

#7: The “shower” tent. While having this facility does not prevent my wet hair from freezing solid after the brief sprint back to my tent, it is still wonderful to have a real shower-like experience on a weekly basis.

#6: The “science” tent, a place for the whole team to gather together for meals, discussion and “Settlers of Catan”.

#5: A camp oven. This resides in the science tent (see above), and has provided such major miracles as a 14 lb roast turkey for our Christmas dinner and pepperoni pizzas!

#4: Propane gas stoves. These represent a quantum leap over the liquid fuel Coleman stoves of twenty years ago that had to be flung out of the tent occasionally due to their propensity for unexpected and spectacular flare-ups.

#3: The miracle of electricity! The solar panels for each tent allow us to power our computers and camera batteries (and to listen to music and watch movies on tent days like today!).

#2: Easy access to satellite phones. The ability to keep in regular contact with family and friends is a huge morale booster.

And, finally, at #1 (drumroll, please!): The poo tent! Enough said.

Katie Joy, Recon Team,　1st January 2013, Szabo Bluff

Happy New Year everyone! Hope that you are well and happy and that you saw the New Year in with good cheer. The recon team have had a glorious couple of days after the trials and bad weather of the previous two weeks. This is a magical place we are in close to the Scott Glacier – stunning scenery and we have had weather which makes you question if you are in Antarctica at all. Yesterday there wasn’t a bit of wind and we could get away without wearing gloves. The big red jackets were stowed away (apart from Joe who seems very attached to his fine outer wear) and we basked in the sunshine. We spent some time driving around to familiarise ourselves with the local terrestrial rock (so that we would know what we weren’t looking for) and then searched a large blue ice sheet close to our new campsite. Today we searched three additional smaller blue icefields, and two larger ones.

Meteorites are more likely to be found on blue ice as it is very slow moving, meaning that the meteorites become exposed on the surface when it is ablated away by the strong Antarctic winds (i.e., the surface ablation is faster than the ice movement). The blue ice is a range of pale blues and has solid ripples all over the surface, like the surface of a wind whipped lake. The ridges and bumps are rather jarring to drive over on the snowmobiles so you take it pretty slow as you keep watch. On the ice we searched yesterday we found 8 meteorites and another 6 today, and we were pretty pleased with the area we have been able to survey and assess in two days.

Whilst you are driving around it is pretty hard to force yourself to keep your eyes down at the ice and rock with all the amazing views to distract you. I have had to take moments every now and then to take in the vista, before concentrating my efforts on the work in hand. We are surrounded by mountains of granite with exposed rock faces and boulders where there are feldspar crystals the size of your fist (today we found one crystal face size). I thought I knew what granite looked like until coming here – there are so many textures, crystal colours and sizes it is amazing. The mountains are jointed so that their faces are textured and mottled, and large snowy mounds overhang off the wind shielded faces. Anywhere else in the world these peaks would be covered in rock climbers – but here it is just us to enjoy them and it is a huge privilege to have this place as our office for a few days.

From Tomoko: 新年明けましておめでとうございます！今年一年がみなさまにとって素晴らしい年になりますように！

Marianne Mader, Systematic Team, Jan. 1, 2012 Larkman Icefield Camp, Beardmore Region, Antarctica

Happy New Year to all those at home! Yesterday, we enjoyed a New Year’s Eve celebration by gathering in one tent and making pizzas in our camp stove (see photo)! What a treat! Today, we went out searching the blue ice again on our snowmobiles and were rewarded with 12 meteorites – a great start to the New Year!

We’re now just over midway through the season, and given that this is the time of year to sit back and reflect; it seems appropriate time to take stock of our efforts so far. To be blunt – it’s been absolutely amazing! We’ve been fortunate to have great weather- with only 1.5 ‘tent days’ to speak of, in which we couldn’t search for meteorites because of an Antarctic blizzard. To date, we’ve collected a total of ~230 meteorites with many samples larger than a grapefruit (see photo of one of the largest samples collected so far)! We’ve had some difficulties with our snowmobiles, but they were all resolved under the guidance of Shaun Norman, our mountaineer guide. Our team of eight, many of whom did not know each other before the trip, has gelled and we now operate as a well-oiled-meteorite-hunting-machine!

I still get excited and recharged with each new meteorite we find – we all high five each other, and congratulate our G-058 team (our science team number designated by NSF). Sometimes I’m so focused on looking down at the ice, I forget to look up. As it’s a time of reflection, I’m stating it here…my new year’s resolution is to remember to “look up” from time to time and soak in the scenery. In the words of Francis Spufford, editor of The Antarctic, An Anthology, “Sit for a while: there are mountains in the distance to which the best response is hush. Take a long, silent look at the treasures of the snow”. (See photo of Shaun enjoying the mountain scenery).

Tomoko Arai, Recon team, 30th December 2012, Szabo bluff

Today we moved to a new target site at last via the Twin Otter aircraft (see the picture). John and I left on the first flight and helped establish the new camp, whilst Joe and Katie stayed behind to clear up the old site. The weather was beautiful, but a bit windy which made packing up camp rather cold. All of us were happy and completely exhausted after pulling down tents and packing all the gear at the previous campsite, and putting up tents and unpacking all the stuff in the new campsite within one day. We are about 40 miles north of the South Graves Icefield and now surrounded by stunning mountains and blue ice fields. We are very much looking forward to going out for meteorite hunting tomorrow!

Joe and Katie and Twin Otter

Katie Joy、Recon Team, 29th December 2012, Graves Icefield

Woohoo – today　was　the　first　day　since　the　19th　December　(when　we　moved　to this field camp site) that we have had relatively calm winds, without driving snow. Finally the tents have stopped flapping, which brings some peace and quiet to camp life. Although we weren’t able to move to our new field area as hoped today,　we did get out to search on the blue ice and were rewarded by finding six meteorites. Everyone of the team found at least one, which made for a satisfying and rewarding day for all after so long being tent bound (see the photo for a post collection celebration moment / or in my case a boy band pose?!?). It was good to get out and stretch our legs as quite frankly after all the eating we have been doing with such little exercise during the last week or so we are turning into little round Weddell seals.

We hope that our work is done at South Graves Icefield and if the winds stay calm (fingers crossed everyone) the flight to our new camp closer to the mountains will take place in the morning.

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