Antarctic Dispatches: Life as a Meteorite Hunter

Marianne under the Antarctica passenger terminal sign before departing Christchurch, New Zealand.

Since 1976, the US-led Antarctic Search for Meteorites (ANSMET) has been recovering meteorite specimens from the Antarctic Ice sheet – just over 20,000 to date! Collected meteorites are shipped, still frozen, to the Antarctic Meteorite Curation labs at NASA Johnson Space Center.

ANSMET is supported by grants from the Office of Polar Programs of the U.S. National Science Foundation and by the Solar System Exploration Division of NASA. The Principal Investigator of the current grant is Dr. Ralph P. Harvey of the Department of Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences at Case Western Reserve University.

More than 150 individuals have been members of ANSMET teams. Only a few Canadians have participated in the program including Dr. Gordon Osinski, Western University. This season, Marianne Mader, PhD Candidate, Western University, was selected and will be blogging on this site (scroll down) throughout the field season! More information about the program can be found here, and blogs from the entire research team are here.

Some the photos that Marianne took before heading to the ice can be found in the gallery.