Arctic / Antarctic / Alpine

Antarctic Search for Meteorites Program (ANSMET) Report October 2024

By Keith Cowing
Status Report
Antarctic Meteorite Newsletter
October 4, 2024
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Antarctic Search for Meteorites Program (ANSMET) Report October 2024
Antarctic Search for Meteorites Program (ANSMET)

Early last February, ANSMET returned home from a short but successful field season: we recovered 208 meteorites in just over two weeks in our first return to Antarctica since the pandemic.

More significantly, we finished up search efforts at one of the most prolific meteorite sites on Earth, the icefields at Davis Nunataks and Mt. Ward (DW). In total, ANSMET teams spent part or all of eight field seasons working (Figure 1) at DW and recovered almost 3500 meteorites from the vast blue icefields and heavy moraines that surround the area.

Our tracklogs show we did a painstakingly thorough job (Figure 2), we pretty much left “no stone unturned”!

Our excitement and satisfaction from the season was short-lived, however, as we were notified that NSF would not be able to support us for the upcoming 2024-25 field season. NSF had announced in mid-2023 that logistics capabilities for new and funded projects would continue to be severely limited due to the enduring impacts from the COVID-19 pandemic, including delays to the major infrastructure upgrade work at McMurdo Station.

NSF noted some progress after the 2023-24 season, but stated there was still a significant backlog of funded projects that needed logistics resources between 2024-26 to achieve their research objectives.

In response to these problems, NSF instituted a hiatus on new US Antarctic Program (USAP)-supported fieldwork proposals in April of 2024. The ANSMET field season for 2024-25 is thus a casualty of the ongoing struggles of the USAP since the pandemic.

So, we’re bummed we won’t get into the field this coming season, but we are already preparing for future field seasons with USAP planners. These future recovery efforts will include the start of systematic searches at the main Dominion Range icefields, finishing up search efforts at the southern end of the Miller Range, and making our way back to the Meteorite Hills area to search and explore icefields we have not visited in over twenty-five years!

We thank NASA and all the ANSMET supporters for the advocacy you’ve given us over the years- hopefully we will return to the field soon and continue to recover vital extraterrestrial materials to the planetary science community!

Figure 1. ANSMET teams from (top left and clockwise) 2010-11, 2023-24, 2014-15, 2019-20, and 2018-19. — Antarctic Meteorite Newsletter

Figure 2. ANSMET tracklogs of one GPS-equipped skidoo over seven search seasons at DW. Note that each track line also had seven other skidoos spaced out 5-10 m apart, performing the same transect across the ice. — Antarctic Meteorite Newsletter

Jim Karner, University of Utah
Ralph Harvey, Case Western

Astrobiology, Astrogeology,

Explorers Club Fellow, ex-NASA Space Station Payload manager/space biologist, Away Teams, Journalist, Lapsed climber, Synaesthete, Na’Vi-Jedi-Freman-Buddhist-mix, ASL, Devon Island and Everest Base Camp veteran, (he/him) 🖖🏻