Andrew Beck, Otway Massif, December 12th, 2012

The final four members of the systematic team, along with about 12,000 lbs of gear, landed safely at Otway Massif at about 12:20 pm today. We were greeted with a balmy -20 C air temperature (a few degrees below 0 F) and 15-20 knot winds. The LC-130 deployed our cargo via a combat drop; the exit ramp was opened while the plane taxied and our gear slid out the back. We then spent the next 3 hours unpacking gear and setting up the remaining tents. Stan, Rob, Tom and Shaun, the four members of the team who arrived on Monday, had done a fine job getting everything ready so we were able to finish in a reasonable amount of time.

A previous ANSMET team recovered a high concentration of ordinary chondrite meteorites very near our camp at Otway Massif a few years ago. Ordinary chondrites (OC) get the first part of their name because they are by far the most common type of meteorite recovered on Earth. In fact, ~91% of all meteorites recovered by the ANSMET program have been OCs (see NASA curation home page listed in a previous blog). To give a sense of proportion, there are about 20 groups of meteorites making up the other 9% of recovered samples. The term “chondrite” refers to the family of meteorite to which the OCs belong. Chondrites are important samples because they were the very first solid materials to form in our Solar System and went on to become the building blocks for the planets. You may be wondering why, if they were the building blocks of planets, are there any still around to fall to Earth as meteorites? The asteroid belt, a ring of debris orbiting the Sun between Mars and Jupiter, represents a whole lot of building blocks that never coalesced into a single planet. Several processes can cause material in the asteroid belt to move out of orbit, some of which then intersects with the Earth’s orbit and falls to the surface as meteorites.

We hope to start collecting soon and will keep everyone updated on our progress. We also want to send positive vibes to the recon team, who are still in McMurdo. Here is hoping you all can get a flight out within the next few days!

Tomoko Arai, 10th December 2012, McMurdo Station

Today four members of the systematic team flew out from the McMurdo base by a LC-130 aircraft, heading for Ottway Massif. The reconnaissance (recon) team heading for Klein Glacier was assigned to a back-up flight, in case that the weather condition of Ottway Massif would not allow for them to land. One day from the departure, we have “Bag Drag” procedure. All the tagged baggage, including check-in bags, hand-carry bags, and all the required gears (so called Extremely Cold Weather (ECW) clothing) need to be weighed (Picture 1). Last night, both the systematic and recon team went through that procedure, and were ready for the departure, pending the final decision on which team will go. In fact, we were not sure which team would fly until late in the morning today, which made us a bit nervous. Finally at noon, the four of the systematic team were ready to go, putting on the ECW gear, while the rest of us shared the excitement with them (Picture 2). All of us warmly saluted each other, hoping to get safely back together here in McMurdo with full of meteorites and stories. Another four of the systematic team are leaving for the same site tomorrow, and the recon team hopefully leaving on Thursday or Friday. The blue ice fields are awaiting us!

Shaun bag drag

Katie ready for scale

Mini Wadhwa, 9 December 10, 2012, McMurdo Station

Imagine being stranded in a small, drafty hut in one of the coldest, most desolate places on Earth, surviving from day to day for months on end on a diet of not much other than seal meat and the occasional cabin biscuit, not knowing whether there was any hope for rescue…

These are the conditions under which some surviving members of Shackleton’s Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition (1914-1917) found themselves. The drafty hut in question is Discovery Hut at Hut Point on Ross Island, which still exists, with much of its contents, in an exquisite state of preservation. It was originally built byRobert Falcon Scott during the Discovery Expedition (1901-1904) and was subsequently used by three other British expeditions including Shackleton’s Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition. This was indeed the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration, when expeditions were feats of endurance and survival was no guarantee. Comparatively speaking, modern expeditions to remote field areas in Antarctica (like ANSMET) are a cakewalk. This was vividly brought home to us today on our tour of Discovery Hut. The first two photos  show typical clothing and food supplies of the Heroic Explorers of Old; for comparison, the two following photos show the cold weather gear and the food issued to us (the Not-So-Heroic but Oh-So-Thankful Explorers of Today).

As of yesterday, all our preparations for being flown out to the field are complete. So it was time to play! Besides the tour of Discovery Hut, we also had a tour of the pressure ridges near Scott Base. These are spectacular features that form when ice sheets break up and collide due to stresses that build up in the sea ice – you can think of these as resulting from “miniaturized ice plate tectonics” (see last photo). Oh yes, in case you noticed, we were quite pleased to be in the Great Antarctic Outdoors. The Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration may be over, but you will find none of us complaining about it!

Katie Joy, McMurdo station, 8th December 2012

Today the ANSMET team had a full science briefing for our future mission collecting meteorites on the boundary between the Transantarctic Mountains and the south polar plateau (see photo 1). Ralph Harvey has provided a previous post (see below) about the ice regions that will be visited by the ANSMET systematic team (Mt. Bumstead, Larkman Nunatak, and the Grosvenor Mts.) and reconnaissance team (Graves Nunatak and Amundsen Glacier) over the next six weeks – there is a lot to do and lots of interesting places to visit.

the science meeting

Both new team members and veterans alike were also educated about the procedures for how the team operates in the field hunting for meteorites, and the important process of careful collection of the samples we hope to find.

We also learnt about how to recognise meteorites on the ice and distinguishing them from local terrestrial rock which will likely be found in many of our search areas, including in glacial moraines (large areas of rock that accumulate at the edges of glaciers and flowing ice). Many of us on the team work with meteorite samples in the laboratory, however, often we tend to work with small chips (~1 cm or less in size) of much larger rocks, or petrographic thin sections (very thin rock slices mounted on glass slides) taken from the interior part of the meteorite. Therefore, we need to train our eyes to recognise that meteorites can look slightly different on the outside as the colour, texture, and coverage of their surficial fusion crust varies from stone to stone. (n.b. Fusion crust is a thin exterior melted portion of the stone which forms when the meteorite passes through the Earth’s atmosphere). Different meteorite types, and where they have come from, will be discussed in future blog posts as there is a lot here to discuss, but we hope to find samples that originated from Mars, the Moon and many different types of asteroids.

I recall from taking part in ANSMET last year that you learn quickly how to spot meteorites, and that there are lots of experienced people on hand to discuss and advise about the recognition process. So we are looking forward to putting our knowledge into practice when we hopefully deploy to the field next week and collect lots of good meteorites this 2012-2013 season. In the mean time, we will be enjoying spending time in McMurdo station, visiting the neighbours (see photo 2), and meeting the McMurdo staff who have been working hard to get everything ready for us to go into the field.  

McMurdo’s neighbors

There is lots of great information about the meteorite collection process on this website, so surf on over to the links, FAQ and download pages.  Links include the partners in the program (NASA’s Johnson Space Center and the Smithsonian Institution).  The FAQs provide more details about ANSMET itself, and the downloads are more detailed stuff you can take home and read at your leisure. 

Katie Joy,   8 Dec 2012,  from McMurdo

This morning we awoke in our Scott tents. This was the first night sleeping ‘out on the ice’. We had been camp bound since the day before, when a snow storm rolled in during our Shakedown trial run (see photo of the storm in full force). Plans to summit Castle Rock and test crevasse rescue training were cancelled when dark clouds with snow precipitation were seen along the horizon, racing towards us.

Instead, for the rest of the afternoon and evening, we stayed inside our remarkable cozy Scott tents, chatting with our tent mate, cooking dinner, writing in journals, and learning new card games. It was a good opportunity to spend time figuring out how to set up our 8 x 8 floor spaces. Finding a system that works for your tent of 2 people is important, and then sticking to it. There’s not a lot of room to play with, so finding a place for each thing is not trivial! (see the picture of my tentmate Mini Wadhwa, from Arizona State University – this is as far apart as we could get from each other in our tent!!).

When we awoke this morning, the wind was silent. At 6:45 am, the green light was given for an 8:30 am start up to Castle Rock for some training and then camp takedown before heading back to McMurdo station. We quickly started getting ready – breakfast, packing lunch and snacks, warming up the skidoos…..during all of this, the silence faded and was replaced by a growing, insistent wind. By 8 am, we were back in the thick of it! The call was made to take down camp immediately and head back to McMurdo.

I kept reminding myself of John Schutt’s (Case Western Reserve University, one of our field team leaders and a mountaineer) words: “in Antarctica we take it day by day”. Good advice to live by no matter where you may be! Here, where the nature of our work is completely dependent on the elements, these words really hit home.  In Antarctica the weather can change in an instant, and even the best laid plans may need altering or even scrapping altogether.  Adapting and responding to the ever changing environment is not only a valuable life skill, but here, a matter of survival.

 Marianne Mader, Dec. 5, 2012  McMurdo Station

Mini relaxing in Scott Tent

Shakedown Whiteout

On the Road Again

Mt. Erebus

John and Shaun demonstrated how to erect a Scott tent, starting with the top pointing toward the wind so that the tent would not catch the wind and blow across the ice like a parachute. Once our tent was up, the others started setting up theirs. We were lucky that there was not much wind because the tents are difficult to set up in wind and can require more than four people per tent. The tents are lined up perpendicular to the wind to minimize the drifting of snow from one tent to another. The sledges and the snowmobiles are parked between the tents, but downwind so that they are not caught up in the drifts behind the tents.
The snow is coming down and the wind is howling again. Soon it will be time to  cook dinner, have another cup of tea and settle in for a warm night in a cold and windy place.

Tom Sharp, Dec 5, 2012 McMurdo Station