PART I - Setting the stage
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 August 2009
Summary
Antarctica is the best place in the world to find meteorites, but it is also a singular place in many other ways. In Part I, while I outline the manner in which the Antarctic Search for Meteorites (ANSMET) project came into being, I also describe our field experiences as untested beginners, discovering the hardships and dangers of this special place in theworld, aswell as our slowly growing awareness and appreciation of its alien beauty. Antarctica is a presence in any scientific research conducted there, imposing its own rules upon what can and cannot be done, how things can be done, and what the cost is for doing those things. At the same time, it rewards the dedicated field person, not only in yielding scientific results not available anywhere else in the world, but with a headful of wonderful memories, startling in their clarity, of snow plumes swept horizontally off rocky peaks like chimney smoke in a strong wind; of poking a hole through a snowbridge and marveling at the clusters of platy six-sided ice crystals that have grown in the special environment of a crevasse below the fragile protection of a few centimeters of snow; of emerging from one's tent after a six-day storm to find the delicate snow structures randomly sculpted by a wind which, while it was churning furiously through camp, seemed to have no shred of decency about it, much less any hint of an artistic impulse; of returning late one evening after a 12-hour traverse to a campsite occupied earlier in the season, when the sun makes a low angle to the horizon and we camp beneath a tremendous tidal wave of ice with its downsun side in shadow and displaying every imaginable shade of blue, and, having been there before, learning again the pleasant feeling of having come home.
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- Meteorites, Ice, and AntarcticaA Personal Account, pp. 5 - 6Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2003