ANSMET 2017-2018 Field Season in the Icefields Surrounding Grosvenor Mountains and Headwaters of Amundsen Glacier, Antarctica

2017-2018 ANSMET Team Members

Ioannis Baziotis, University of Athens, Greece

Barbara Cohen*, NASA Marshall Space Flight Center, Alabama

James Day*, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego, California

Juliane Gross, Rutgers State University of New Jersey

Jim Karner*, science lead, University of Utah

Brian Rougeux*, second mountaineer

John Schutt*, head mountaineer and field safety officer since 1981, Case Western Reserve University, Ohio

Scott Van Bommel, University of Guelph, Ontario, Canada

Veterans of previous seasons are marked with an asterisk (*). Pictured above (l to r) Scott, Jim, James, Juliane, Barbara, Brian, John, and Ioannis.

The eight scientists pictured above have returned home from their austral-summer expedition to Antarctic icefields, collecting 263 meteorites, thus closing the 41st field season of the Antarctic Search for Meteorites (ANSMET) program. Operating as two, independent field groups, the teammates worked in the icefields surrounding Mts. Cecily and Raymond (also known as the Grosvenor Mountains) and the icefields in the headwaters region of Amundsen Glacier, only one of which had been visited previously by ANSMET in the 1995-96 season. They used the tried-and-true meteorite-searching tactics of snowmobile sweeps of the large icefields and meticulous foot-searching of glacial moraines to recover the exquisite samples of extraterrestrial material.

ANSMET is run as a cooperative effort by NASA, the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF-Office of Polar Programs), and the Smithsonian Institution to meet the strong scientific demand for new extraterrestrial specimens. As described at the ANSMET website by Principal Investigator Ralph Harvey (Case Western Reserve University), "These specimens are a reliable, continuous source of new, non-microscopic extraterrestrial material and support thousands of scientists from around the globe as they seek essential 'ground-truth' concerning the materials that make up the asteroids, planets and other bodies of our solar system." Details of curation, characterization, and allocation of the ANSMET meteorites are available from the NASA Johnson Space Center: curator.jsc.nasa.gov/antmet/index.cfm. Qualified scientists are directed to that site for more information about procedures and deadlines for requesting meteorite samples for study.

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For more information see: the ANSMET website, the February 2018 Antarctic Meteorite Newsletter, and from PSRD: Meteorites on Ice,  and  Searching Antarctic Ice for Meteorites.

See also:
35 Seasons of U.S. Antarctic Meteorites (1976-2010): A Pictorial Guide to the Collection, edited by K. Righter, C. Corrigan, T. McCoy, and R. Harvey, American Geophysical Union and John Wiley & Sons, Inc., December 2014, 320 pages.

Antarctic Meteorite Classification Database, by curator.jsc.nasa.gov.

Antarctic Meteorite Sample References, searchable bibliography with over 1600 peer-reviewed publications through 2017, by curator.jsc.nasa.gov.

PSRD General Resources, for meteorite and planetary science.

Written by Linda Martel, Hawai'i Institute of Geophysics and Planetology, for PSRD.