Emory Mckenzie
Welcome to Longitude Sound Bytes, where we bring innovative insights from around the world directly to you.

Hi, I am Emory Mckenzie, I will be your host today. I recently completed my masters in Geosciences at Rice University and now working for Chevron to discover energy resources.

For this episode, I had an opportunity to speak with Brandon Dugan Professor of Geophysics at the Colorado School of Mines. I was curious about Brandon’s research on unconventional freshwater resources that discovered under the Atlantic seabed. I wanted to know more about how he develops such fascinating research.

Join me in a conversation about his approach to science, mentoring, and writing papers and what led him to this project. Enjoy listening!

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Brandon Dugan
I was always fascinated with science and engineering and started out just as a math major. Maybe on the on the creativity side and the brain of an 18-year-old, it seemed kind of boring to me. I was good at math but doing math for math’s sake didn’t really encourage me or excite me or anything like that. So, I just started looking through a physical paper catalog at the time in the 1990s, you know, what majors used math to do other things. And I found the geological engineering program. It seemed to engage my math and science brain, but also my desire to work with nature and see things. So unbeknownst to me, I sort of saw early creativity of trying to take natural processes and explain them with math and physics. I started out and completed my degree in geological engineering and during that time, I was fortunate enough to do two internships at Oak Ridge National Lab. And so, in the middle of taking my classes where everything had an answer that was perfect to three decimal places in my engineering curriculum, I started measuring things in the earth during these internships. I realized that the Earth was much more complex than a number that I looked at in the book. And so, I really got interested in how the Earth changed and how well we can understand that. I started thinking about water processes and sort of it was going back to my youth, I spent a lot of time outside in nature playing in water, and I saw that, hey, I could still do my science and engineering and look at water. I just saw the complexity of Earth and the elegance of math and how we could work together to explain problems. Pursued that on my PhD more on the geo side, on the earth side of things, and on the engineering side. And I’ve continued that career just chasing problems that I want to find an explanation to. I might not find an answer, but I can at least provide some insight to how something works.

Emory
You were more into geomechanics and like slope stability on the seafloor, and now you’re in the freshwater resources. How do we get to that transition?

Brandon
Great. So yeah, as you mentioned, Emory, for my PhD, I worked on geomechanics. So how sediments in this case, not rocks are things that were softer than real rocks, kind of like modeling clay, how they break apart and form landslides in the ocean on these really low angle slopes, almost flat slopes. We did a lot of work, both with elegant math and field studies, just like I talked about and how I got there of trying to understand this. And in doing so I was just looking back at a lot of historical literature. What do we know about these continental shelf environments near the coastline. And I found these, this dataset from the 1970s, where the US Geological Survey had found freshwater beneath the ocean on the continental shelf. They weren’t looking for freshwater, they were actually trying to do a minerals assessment along the margin of the United States in the 1970s. And so, they wrote about it, but it wasn’t their primary objective. So, they didn’t really try to explain it. And so, it was geographically proximal to where I was studying submarine landslides. And it was just another problem or phenomenon that was interesting to me. Why would you find freshwater beneath a big body of saltwater the biggest body of saltwater on Earth? And so, I started trying to explain that, again, similarly, trying to understand, theoretically, how could this water be there in the perfect world? How could we explain water being 50 kilometers offshore, and 200 meters below this below the seafloor being fresh enough that you could drink came up with some predictions. And since then, we’ve been trying to collect data to improve and revise those predictions about how that water got there. How much water is there? And what that water might be used for?

Emory
Could you speak to like how collaboration helps the creative process for you? Like, how is their expertise fueling your motivation for studies?

Brandon
I think part of it, it sort of starts with my career starting out in engineering and going to geosciences. I’ve been able to work on both sides of that field and see that what a geologist knows and can work with an engineer to solve a problem. So, when it comes to things like, I need to look at solute transport, how salts moving around. I understand the basic physics of that problem but to really understand what we need to measure and how we need to measure it, I need to talk to somebody who thinks about that problem intimately and they can share their information with me, and I can share my information with them. The sum is greater than the individual parts kind of thing. For me, it’s always bringing in new knowledge. We pay a lot of money, we put a lot of time into collecting data, let’s get everything we can out of it. So, if somebody can contribute to the puzzle, let’s think about how they think about that science. And then I might think about it differently based on their perspective, just like you might think about it differently from your perspective based on your training if you’re a pure engineer and as a pure geologist, and we’re studying the same problem.

Emory
When you bring students in to come work with you, is it best to have a kind of geomechanics background a freshwater resources background, or engineering?

Brandon
I guess for students who are coming to work with me, I probably view two things that are probably less discipline specific than that first is really important. So, one is a passion about whatever problem they’re working on. So, if I have a student who is really interested in geomechanics, that’ll get me excited about geomechanics and we can learn together. I have a student who’s really interested in freshwater resources, and they have a project they want to attack that that will excite me, and we’ll work together. And that’s again, going back to collaboration and teamwork, you can feed off each other’s enthusiasm. So, I don’t really have a preference, it’s more of their perspective of why they want to do this and what their end goals are, whether it be to go work for a government agency, to go work in an engineering consulting firm, you know, as long as they show that passion and that enthusiasm to me, that’s what I’d like. And then underlying that, I like to see strong math and physics backgrounds, because whether it be in the modeling that I do numerically, there’s a lot of math and physics behind that, or even the field work that we do, there’s a lot of math and physics underlying that. And so, if they have that underlying knowledge, I feel like I can mentor them, and help them learn the discipline-specific things, whether it be electrical resistivity surveys, or triaxial stress experiments, or groundwater flow, I feel like I can add that subject expertise on top of the fundamentals.

Emory
So those students who come in, they want to work on a certain problem. Let’s say they want to branch out how do you influence them, or motivate them to branch out of their comfort zone and study a different problem and learn a new discipline?

Brandon
I try to let students develop their own thought process. So, I will help them with questions. I will rarely tell them what they have to do. And if I see things that are peripherally related to what they’re doing, I might point them in the direction say, oh, have you ever thought about this, or when constructing their thesis committees or things like that, I tried to make sure that we have a well-rounded group of people. So, they’re getting feedback from people who are not the same expertise as me.

I just returned from the American Geophysical Union Conference last week in San Francisco. It has a whole range of geophysical problems. And so, when I’m there with students and mentoring them, I tell them to go explore things that they’re just curious about, maybe it might not be their primary area of interest but there’s 20,000 wonderful scientists there. Let’s go hear what some other people have to say. Maybe they’re talking about water on Mars. So, it’s related to water at some level, but it’s on a different planet. So, I try to encourage students to think of their skill set and how it can be applied to other disciplines, because their creativity, their interests will change over time, we might get new datasets that will change over time, we might discover old datasets that will make us think about something differently. So I always like to encourage students that it’s their approach to thinking about a problem, which is which is what’s going to get them success, not just picking I want to do this problem, because it’s exciting right now in the news, or it’s a buzz trending on some social media, you know, they should do what interests them and try to find creative problems that excite them.

Emory
I’m glad you mentioned the conference because conference is where you get a lot of ideas. There’s so many people studying so many different sciences that you might hear one word that like piques your interest in talking, it’s like, this is something that I want to study now.

Brandon
Yep.

Emory
I love geosciences. Because it’s always a linkage between two sciences, now especially, you have to incorporate many disciplines to kind of understand a problem. Have there been any big discoveries in freshwater resources within the past, say 20 years?

Brandon
Yeah, so I’ve collaborated with Chloe Gustafson at Columbia University, her PhD advisor, Kerry Key at Columbia University, and another colleague of ours, Rob Evans, at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in the 2000s, really developed how we could use electrical techniques in marine environments to image where we see pieces of the earth that are more resistive or less resistive. And that has allowed us to basically make 2D pictures of where we think freshwater and saltwater interacting beneath the ocean without actually sampling them. So, it gives us targets to drill if we want to understand the age of those waters, and when they were emplaced, or geometries to think about, where, is water flowing in really thin lenses or is it in big, blocky bodies. And so, they overcame some pretty interesting technological concepts to be able to do these electrical surveys in the ocean because the ocean is full of saltwater. So, you put current in it, and it just wants to short circuit and go right through the saltwater. And so, they were trying to basically set and current into the more resistive layer. They figured that out and it’s now helped how well we can constrain where freshwater might be in the offshore environment without actually having to drill the well like they did in the 70s. Of course, we have to work with well data to get the true rock properties and fluid properties. But the two work together to get sort of fine scale features and then map them out more regionally with the geophysical data.

Now we can look at precise locations where we might want to drill and sample the waters to find out if they’re 10,000 years old or 100,000 years old, or 100 years old, which might tell us something about how quickly they’re recharging. Are they recharging over human timescales, something like a modern aquifer that we use to get a lot of drinking water and agricultural water from or is it something that’s a relic from in a previous climate state when sea level was lower, and glaciers were larger, or something like that.

Emory
When you’re writing a paper, so how do you kind of get creative, let’s say in the discussion section of a paper?

Brandon
I guess I’ll talk about my writing process in general. Two things that I do when I start writing is, first one is, I think about the figures I want to present. What is the data and information that I want to show? Doesn’t have to be the perfect figures. They can be hand sketches, but the first thing I want to show. I’m looking offshore in New England. I need a map. I need to tell them where we’re working. We’re gonna show them some seismic data. So, I’m gonna have to have a picture of some seismic data. I’m gonna have a groundwater model so I’m gonna have to have, you know, some of these things. So, I look at the picture and that sort of tells, that gives me the overall flow of the paper that I want. And then what works best for me is just to write, so it’s just brain dumps. I don’t try to edit. I don’t try to do anything. And I just, I just write, and I write, and I write, and I write, and then I go back and sort of rearrange things to align with the order of those pictures. And then when it gets to, sort of the main part of your question, where’s the sort of creativity and the integration come in? I go back to what motivated me about this. The introduction of my paper is going to say, what motivated this study in freshwater resources. I’m just really curious as to why do we have freshwater offshore. We predict that there might be as much as 300 years of freshwater available to New York City offshore, even if it’s not renewable or recharged today. That’s pretty amazing to me that there’s that much freshwater beneath the ocean. And so, when I’m thinking about the discussion, I’m trying to think about, you know, what’s my original, simple prediction based on theory. How was that refined from the data that I collected? Just like you mentioned. And then how do I weave these things together to sort of say, how much of that original motivation have I addressed. Yes, we’re confident the waters there, we have uncertainty about how much because we have uncertainty in this data quantity. If we change our model by this much, here’s, here’s where we get with uncertainty. And so, I think about a lot about how do I put uncertainty on it. Or another way to think about is like, how can I put confidence on my work? And it’s by pulling all these things together, being honest to the data. An observation is an observation. You have to explain it to your audience, whether it aligns with your original hypothesis or not. It’s usually my experience, the ones that don’t align with the original hypothesis are the ones that require the most creative thought, not to explain them, but to understand them so you can explain them. Why didn’t this match? There’s a reason for it. It can be because I didn’t understand the system, it could be because we took a sample the wrong way. All of these things are valuable. So, I go back and think about what was my motivation, have I used my evidence to support that we’ve made some advancement there, and also motivate future science.

So, when I’m talking to my graduate students, or early career researchers and colleagues, I tell them that any great science project will answer one question and ask six or seven more good questions. And to me that’s success. It may feel like you’re not making a lot of progress, because you keep asking more questions. But that’s actually one of the parts where a lot of us, myself included struggle when it comes to science, because you’re trying to address this one question. And then two new ones pop up and you want to address those. But at some point, you have to say no, I need to stop and just answer this first question and save the other ones for later. And so when do I call a project done? Well, it’s probably never done, but I know when to stop and restart and share the information with the community.

Emory
It’s the beauty of science. Once you know one thing, we need to know three more.

Brandon
Yes, exactly. You’d asked or mentioned sort of like how I deal with like roadblocks at the beginning in things like if I have roadblocks when I’m writing, when I’m thinking about new projects. For me, it’s really, I love my work. I love what I do. I’ve been doing it for 20 plus years, it’s evolved from different aspects of mechanics to freshwater, but breaks are important. And so for me, it’s being outside in nature, whether it be hiking or walking. I like to spend time out in nature. I used to do a lot of running, now I do a lot of hiking and camping. Even simple things as I commute to and from work most ways, I park in the farthest place that I can of a parking lot, so I get some extra time outside. To me, it’s that fresh air and recycling of it, let’s my mind sort of let go of everything. Forget about it. And then a couple hours later, the next morning, pick it up. So, for me it’s just physical and mental detachment from the workstation as much as I love the workstation.

Emory
I greatly appreciate your time and all the insight.

Brandon
Thank you.

Emory
I’m kind of interested in freshwater resources now!

Brandon
Yeah, it’s really cool what we’re doing. So, we think the one in New England is driven by the last age of glaciation. We have glaciers there 10,000 years ago, but we’re also looking at some in New Zealand where there weren’t glaciers 10,000 years ago. So, some of these looks like they are sort of active today and some look like they’re probably relic. Sometimes you find the most curious things when you’re not looking for them and nobody was looking for freshwater and beneath the ocean and that’s what they found.

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Emory
We hope you enjoyed our episode. I’m constantly fascinated with our ability to find natural resources that contribute to the well-being of society. Brandon’s approach to research showed me that exploring past discoveries, then applying new knowledge can lead to developing great science and solving problems.

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To view the episode transcript, please visit Longitude.site. If you’re a college student interested in leading a conversation like this, visit our website Longitude.site to submit an interest form or write to us at podcast@longitude.site.

Join us next time for more unique insights on Longitude Sound Bytes.

 

 

Louis Noel
Welcome to Longitude Sound Bytes, where we bring innovative insights from around the world directly to you.

As part of our series focusing on science expeditions in harsh environments, our conversations aim to shed light on fascinating projects that help us understand our planet and life on earth better.

I am Louis Noel, a graduate student at Rice University pursing a master’s in engineering management and leadership.

For this episode, I had an opportunity to speak with Linda Welzenbach Fries, the science communicator in the Department of Earth, Environment and Planetary Sciences at Rice University. She is also an avid science photographer who has participated in several expeditions in Antarctica, including one aboard a research vessel that was taking samples from the Thwaites Glacier to help us understand the changes in the ice sheet.

We will be exhibiting photographs from her expeditions at the Rice University library this spring. This episode provides a bit of background on the THOR expedition through my conversation with Linda. We start off with Linda speaking about what THOR stands for and how it is part of a large international collaboration. Enjoy!

Linda Welzenbach Fries
THOR is an acronym for Thwaites Glacier Offshore Research. It is one of eight projects that is part of the International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration. This is a collaboration that is really big. It’s joint with the Natural Environmental Research Council, which is the UK version of the National Science Foundation. It’s the biggest of its kind in 70 years and is multi-millions of dollars. There are eight projects of which THOR is one. The purpose of this entire sort of collaboration is to study what is happening with Thwaites Glacier. And the reason for that is Thwaites Glacier is very large. It’s about the size of the UK, or maybe even the state of Florida in terms of its extent. It is very vulnerable to the rising temperatures of the ocean. So, they want to know what is happening presently, so some of the projects are studying the active dynamics of the of the glacier itself, and then there are others that are looking at what has happened in the past. So we can combine that with our present observations and past observations to better predict what might happen to that glacier in the future because it has a significant potential contribution to sea level rise. They’re talking upwards of a meter or a meter and a half.

Louis
My goodness, that would put a lot of cities in peril. Could you tell us the path that led you to be a part of this expedition?

Linda
Part of it was being in the right place at the right time. I started in my position as the science writer at the Department of Earth, Environmental Planetary Sciences late in 2016. One of the faculty, Dr. John Anderson, and his postdoc, Lauren Simkins, were working with several other scientists to write a proposal to be part of this particular collaboration. And they came to me and said, we have to write a National Science Foundation broader impact as part of this proposal. And those impacts are important because basically scientists are required now, essentially, to communicate the results of their scientific activities to the public. So, I was there at the right place to help them write this broader impact statement, and as part of that, when we were meeting together and talking about what we wanted that impact to be, they wanted to know, how would I feel about potentially being the outreach sort of person for one of the research cruises, not all of them. There were actually supposed to be two or three of them as part of the proposal. And they said, Hey, how would you like to go and, you know, report what the science activities on the boat were, as part of this project, so I said, of course.

Louis
Very cool. Could you speak about your role as a science writer and photographer on the research cruise?

Linda
One of the things that I’d propose to do as part of my participation on the project, if I was on the cruise was basically to write sort of regular blogs. Of course, when you write a blog, you also want to have, you know, a lot of imagery to go with it. Images are worth a lot of words. And we have a limit on the amount of data that can be transmitted once we get down below 60 degrees, because everything is done by satellite. And most of the communications are for safety and navigation reasons. And so, we all have a limit on how much data can be moved off the ship and back to the mainland. Really good pictures with some good text, that sort of combination, was something that I had not really done before. And so I did a little bit of learning along the way. I also happened to be drafted to help out with a lot of the scientific activities too, because they were shorthanded. And so that in and of itself was quite important and useful as part of my outreach activities because when you’re actively participating, you have a better feel for the kinds of images that tell the story.

Louis
Very cool. Yeah, I can tell that some hands-on experience probably informed some cool shots to take and maybe put you in the line of action, where you may get some shots you may not have. I actually read one of the blogs and it was so cool, just walked you day by day of things you were experiencing. It seems like the expedition, just to get there is an adventure of itself. So, could you kind of walk me through the nature of the science cruises? You know, maybe like what happens at first, like getting there, and then some of the general work of the scientists?

Linda
First thing I want to say is, this is my first and only cruise. I haven’t done any cruises before this. I’ve been to Antarctica, which is part of the reason why they said, hey, would you mind going- we think you would make a good member of the team. You know what it’s like to basically work under sort of difficult conditions and help to get things done.

Most of the research cruises to Antarctica leave from Punta Arenas, Chile. That is the most optimal location. It’s the shortest distance to basically work that is along the Antarctic Peninsula and down [and] around into the Amundsen Sea embayment to study these very vulnerable glaciers.

The transit from Punta Arenas to the Amundsen Sea embayment, which was our ultimate destination, was going to take somewhere in the neighborhood of 7 to 10 days, three-to-four-day transit across Drake’s passage, and then another three or four days, essentially, to pass along the peninsula and into the embayment, which is a very difficult place to get to.

We have satellite observations over the last 25 years, which is another sort of motivator, because they’d seen these dynamical changes in the glacier over this period of time, but we had very little sort of up-close data of the glacier itself to support what we were observing.

This particular cruise that I went on was also essentially sort of an orientation cruise for a number of the projects. In fact, THOR wasn’t the only project going on this cruise. We had GHOST, and this is one of the ITGC projects that is looking at how the glacier advanced and retreated. And they’re looking at the sort of the surface features of the glacier on islands and various other places. One of the other projects on this particular cruise was TARSAN, and they have a multifaceted group that does a bunch of different things, most of which is oceanographic. As part of that, they were conducting sea trials for this particular autonomous underwater vehicle called the HUGIN. It looks a lot like a torpedo. It was bright orange. They did an initial test, because we had to figure out not only how to get into the water, but how to retrieve it. When we started that trip, it was beautiful. The skies were very, very sunny. And this is an area that’s notorious for bad weather.

Louis
What time of the year is this?

Linda
We usually leave at the end of January. This was a two-month cruise, so we were essentially leaving around the 28th of January, we’re supposed to get back into port around the 24th of March. We were going to spend one day working out the kinks, the logistics, on deploying and retrieving the HUGIN from the water. We have a special team of technicians that essentially assist the scientists and all their scientific activities on board ship, they’re called marine technicians. It was their job, to go into the water with the Zodiac, and figure out how to retrieve this 1000+ pound piece of equipment and get it back into the sling so that they can haul it back on board. And when they went out to get it, the weather had turned, and the waves were really high. But they did. They managed to figure it out and then they were able to deploy it several more times when we actually got down to the Twaites Glacier.

Louis
I’d want to touch a little bit about the conditions of Antarctica. Could you describe some of the skill sets or mindset that are essential to be a part of an expedition like these?

Linda
The most important is to be able to cope with plans that don’t go the way you expect them to. Always have a plan B, even a Plan C or Plan D. Maintain sort of a positive outlook. Make sure that you are being aware of how you interact with everybody. You’re dealing with very, very few people who get very, very little sleep. There was something in the neighborhood of 50 scientists on this cruise and there are less than 20 people who actually manage the ship and help us out with the scientific activities. It’s astounding. Yeah, so being able to roll with it is really, really important. I think recognizing that it’s more about the science than it is about, everybody’s comfort. We’re there basically to accomplish some really amazing work. We have a unique opportunity. Everybody has to work together.

The skill sets are associated with the science that you have to do. So obviously, you have to understand how to run the equipment that you need to run and what data you’re collecting, and whether or not the data is actually good data so that you can solve problems on the fly. The ship essentially going toward its destination, it’s always collecting data. And that data is essentially the structure or the shape of the seafloor. That data is collected with a device called a multibeam echosounder. So, it’s using sound, sound waves essentially, to see the bottom of the sea floor.

Louis
So, it’s like more sophisticated sonar?

Linda
Yes.

Louis
Interesting.

Linda
They have an idea of the depth of the of the water column and the shape of the seafloor that it has literally bounced off of.

Louis
I believe that word is that word called bathymetry. Or is that just the science of studying it?

Linda
Yeah, that is the bathymetry. Seafloor bathymetry. What’s important about it is the different kinds [structures]. They know now, after many years of research, that the various shapes and structures that they see on the sea floor are definitely resulting from different kinds of movement of an ice shelf, or sliding material through turbidity currents, or you know, any kind of obvious, sort of marine geology event.

Louis
Is there any sort of like glacier intellect like this was formed by a glacier, 1000 – 2000 years ago by the seafloor or is it mainly just for more recent studies, like seafloor mapping?

Linda
Broadly speaking, the technology has been advancing significantly over the last couple decades, and so the detail that they are able to achieve with the multibeam echosounder is amazing. Actually, one of the goals of the of the HUGIN was to be able to provide similar kinds of data, but in even more detail because it would be located significantly closer to the [sea]floor so it could collect data at a much finer resolution than they can where the ship is sitting at the at the sea surface.

Louis
What do we learn from sampling glacier ice, and the sediments? And why are they valuable?

Linda
THOR’s primary function is looking at the geophysical sort of manifestation of ice sheet, advance and retreat [on the seafloor]. And then the other part of it is that they are basically collecting the sediments, because the sediments actually record a lot of information all the way back to the Last Glacial Maximum about what has happened on the seafloor, and what the ice sheet and the ocean have been doing over that period of time. And then they use that information from the past to basically model what potentially could happen in the future.

Louis
I see, so very valuable for climate science in general and geology. So fascinating. What’s the general approach for gathering samples?

Linda
There’s two ways they do that. The multibeam bathymetry is a good supporting activity, because it shows you the places on the seafloor that are optimal for potentially collecting samples. Then they also use another sort of semi-passive seismic, it’s called a sub-bottom profiler which basically uses a sound or ping that actually can penetrate somewhere in the neighborhood of up to 20 to 30 meters below the seafloor surface. And so then, what they look for, and this was actually one of my jobs on my shift, was to spend about four hours literally watching each and every ping of the sub-bottom profiler and looking specifically for areas where there’s sediment buildup in the neighborhood of a few 10s of meters, because those would be great areas to target for gathering or capturing sediment using one of the cores.

Louis
Could you please explain that a bit more how the core works?

Linda
Yes. There’s actually three cores. There is a core that samples just about the first upper meter, and there’s another core called the Kasten corer that is gravity core in which they literally has weights on top of it, and it punches its way down into the sediment. And then they have a Jumbo corer, which can gather even a deeper [sample]. It’s heavier and can gather even more sediment, a much larger volume, and much deeper section of seafloor sediment.

Louis
And then they bring it up and set it on a giant table and start doing the analysis, right?

Linda
Well, you have to like mud.

Louis
Yeah, I saw that picture. It’s just like mud.

Linda
So, the coring itself is obviously done by the technicians on board ship. They know what the right calculations are for the amount of speed and weight that are needed in a particular depth. They collect it, bring it back up on board, and then it is lowered in a horizontal position. Then they essentially leave the actual sort of moving of the core into the core laboratory to the scientists. So, we have to literally pick it up, put it on top of a dolly and wheel into the core lab. Then we clean it up, take the lid off, and then literally start processing the core.

Louis
Cool. What sort of instruments do you use to analyze the samples within the core?

Linda
The first thing you do is you use your eyes. Most of what you do on ship is prepare the core for shipment so that it can later then be studied by scientists. So, the first thing that they have to do is they literally clean the core up. Once you remove essentially the cap, you scrape the surface, so that you can actually see the layers, and that process can take several hours. And it’s a very careful process because you don’t want to disturb any of the layers. This is a fluid material. It’s a lot like peanut butter. And, so you want to be very, very careful about not disturbing the layers, which can be quite fine. From there, one of my jobs as the photographer was to actually take pictures once the core had been processed to also capture visually, the cores, you know, from the top to the bottom, to match it up with the actual description.

The other thing that we do with the cores is we subsample them for various types of scientific activities that really are time sensitive. And then after that, the core gets prepared, essentially for storage.

Louis
How many cores do you usually take?

Linda
We collected 26 cores, I think we did, or we made an attempt at 26 cores. I can’t remember any more how much we did. Part of not remembering everything is because everybody does 12-hour shifts. It is quite a day. And not only are you tired when you go to bed, you also have to somehow fit into that period of time, email, eating, showering, laundry, and so probably you’re up for maybe 18 hours. And so, sleep deprivation is a problem. Well, and there’s routine, and routine is good. With routine, you can basically start to not expend a lot of energy on making sure you’re doing what you need to do. You basically reduce the amount of energy that you need through routine.

Louis
Yeah, it involves a lot of thinking power if you are having to plan things every day but if you have a routine, it eliminates a big chunk of that. I’m sure it varied like day by day but what was a typical day like on the THOR expedition?

Linda
So for me, my shift was from noon to midnight. I would get up around 10 – 10:30 – 11, and I might actually process images that I took the day before or work on the blog that I started to work on. And then at noon, we would have an all hands meeting with the science PI who’s basically in charge of all the science activities going on aboard the ship. And he basically lays out what is happening each day. And that’s actually quite important.

The weather is dynamic. So, therefore that has a significant impact on how things will go throughout the day. So, we always have a plan B and a plan C to go along with that. Then I would spend that first four hours of my shift, looking at the sub-bottom profiler data, printing out or identifying those areas which I think are probably good candidates for coring. Then after that, I typically am on core-processing duty for the rest of the day. I may actually be part of monitoring the actual coring that’s going on itself, or sampling the core, or photographing the core, or doing one of the many activities associated with handling and managing the core. And then when I’m off at midnight. Midway through the cruise it’s daylight most of the time. We get some twilight, starting at like four-ish in the morning or something like that. It is twilight for a couple of hours and then it’s daylight again. So that’s kind of the time that I have to take pictures, or if somebody gets me up early enough, because there’s something really interesting to see, I might take pictures before I my shift starts. But once the shift starts, you are kind of tied to the tasks that you are in charge of. And it’s really important to complete those tasks too. There’s nobody else there to pick up the slack.

Louis
Very interesting. That sounds like quite the day and to do that day in day out. I mean, do you have the weekends off or is it every single day?

Linda
Every single day.

Louis
Wow. Are there any other instruments or tools, like the HUGIN on the research vessel that may be unusual? Like you wouldn’t expect it to be on a ship?

Linda
No. The thing that was really neat is, there’s a helipad on the ship but there was no helicopter.

Louis
Ah, bummer. No joy rides.

Linda
No joy rides. We’re never going to be in a situation where we were going to be within range for deploying a helicopter or carrying all that fuel so there were no helicopters.

The thing that I found the most fascinating was doing seal tagging. The TARSAN team was collecting data of the ocean and the ocean-ice interaction using very interesting science partners. And those science partners were seals because they can dive very, very deep, for longer periods of time, and go places that none of our instrumentation can go.

Louis
Genius!

Linda
What happens is they literally install [a CTD] on top of a seals’ head, which doesn’t harm the seal in any way. A [very] small version of the CTD. So, a CTD is an instrument that is deployed over the ship to collect information about the ocean from the surface to depth. It is a very large piece of equipment. Well, they have managed to miniaturize the CTDs for seals. And so their goal is to find seals that have shed all of the previous years’ fur, attach the CTD to their head, which will remain there until they molt the following year. And in that period of time, as the seals essentially go to the surface, and then dive and come back to the surface, the data that they collect in that period of time is transmitted back to the scientists in real time.

Louis
That’s so cool.

Linda
And they’re basically collecting all this data in a period of time that we can’t, you know, in the dead of winter, so we have a better idea of what is happening at the ocean-ice interface in periods of time that we cannot do any monitoring.

Louis
Very cool. Yeah, that’s genius.

Linda
They also have permission. They have to get very special permits in order to interact with these animals.

Louis
Was there anything unexpected you encountered during the expedition?

Linda
For me? Yes. Everything actually on this cruise was unexpected, because it’s something I’ve never done before. But that said, the crossing of Drake’s passage was pretty tough. It generally, at least according to most people, is tough because the weather is always bad. And in particular, when we made our crossing, there were actually two low pressure cyclones back-to-back. Yeah, so the waves were particularly rough. 20 feet, probably maybe more, it’s very difficult to tell, believe it or not, when you’re up high in on the on the bridge of the ship, it all just looks big. And, if I wasn’t on the bridge, I was basically sleeping, because the truth of the matter is, it makes you super, super tired to be in in that much motion.

Louis
Has the THOR project changed your skills or style of photography in any way?

Linda
Obviously, the more pictures you take, the easier it is to adjust to changing conditions. The environment in which you take the pictures, obviously is unique. So, there’s a learning curve associated with that. It helps you obviously learn to compensate for vibration. Lighting is very, very different there. Because out where it’s all ice, it’s very, very bright and very flat. So, you have to figure out ways to give depth to your images. There’s a big, big difference between doing photography for documentary science, versus taking pictures of things that are artistically pleasing and still making sort of both work together to tell a story. So that part of it, I think I learned a lot about that probably. It’s an improvement.

Louis
Judging by your photography website. It is fantastic. And I just want to say thank you again for coming to speak with us about glacier sampling and contributing not only about glacier sampling, but the meteorite search. It’s going to be a really cool exhibition that we put on for Rice and it’s a pleasure to have you as part of the Rice community too, so thank you.

Linda
My pleasure. Thank you.

[music]

Louis
We hope you enjoyed hearing about the science and adventure of the THOR expedition. Please visit Longitude [dot] site for the episode transcript.

If you are around Houston this spring, stop by the Rice University library to view an exhibition of photographs from Linda’s collection. Our exhibit will be available for display at other university libraries upon request.

If you are a college student interested in leading conversations for our next podcast series, please write to us at podcast@longitude.site.

Join us next time for more unique insights on Longitude Sound Bytes.

 

 

Elizabeth Fessler
Welcome to Longitude Sound Bytes, where we bring innovative insights from around the world directly to you.

As part of our series focusing on scientific expeditions in harsh environments and the individuals who are advancing it, our conversations aim to shed light on fascinating projects that help us understand and improve our planet.

I am Elizabeth Fessler, a student at Rice University pursing a degree Art History and History with a focus on museums and cultural heritage.

For this episode, I had an opportunity to speak with Dr. Cari Corrigan from the Smithsonian.

Dr. Corrigan is a curator at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. Here at Longitude, we are putting together an exhibition of photos from the US Meteorite Search expeditions in Antarctica, I wanted to speak to Cari about the role of the Smithsonian and also to understand her role as a curator.

We began our conversation with background information on her role at the Smithsonian and what led her to it. Enjoy listening!

Cari Corrigan
I am a geologist at the Smithsonian, and I study meteorites. So, my main job is really in two parts. I do research on meteorites and try to figure out how they fit into the bigger puzzle of how the solar system formed. And I also curate meteorites. So, I’m the curator of the Antarctic meteorite collection at the National Museum of Natural History, which a lot of people don’t realize the Smithsonian has something like 17 different museums, and we’re just one of them. All the meteorites that get brought back from the US National meteorite program go through Johnson Space Center, and then they come to me, and my job is to figure out what kind of meteorite it is.

Elizabeth
So, your work generally is revolving around meteorites and Antarctica? How did you become interested in this specific field of study?

Cari
I started out studying astronomy and I took a geology class as a sort of a, an elective science class that fit into the astronomy program. And I was like, Oh, actually, this is really cool, too. And so I talked to the professor and they said, Well, there’s a thing called planetary geology, which I was like, what is that? And like, Okay, this is what I’m going to do for a major. I figured there’s no way I’m ever getting a job doing this but at least I will enjoy the four years of my life. Well, I have to get a degree and learn how to study something. So as part of that, I ended up with an advisor randomly, who was doing a meteorite project and said, Oh, this fits into that perfectly. I did a project with him, which led to doing an internship at Johnson Space Center. And the advisor I had there had this picture of himself standing in the snow with a bunch of people. And I was like, What is this? Like random guys on a snowmobile? And he said, Oh, that was when I went to Antarctica to look for meteorites. This guy was a total joker. He was always making up funny jokes. And I was like, oh, okay, haha, right, that doesn’t exist. And he was like, no, no, really, we go down there because they’re, they’ve been sitting there for hundreds of 1000s of years and they’re just waiting for us to go down and pick them up. So, we go down and collect them on the ice. And then I was sort of hooked. And it turns out that the guy who ran that program ended up being my PhD advisor. That one summer changed all my perspective on what I wanted to do.

Elizabeth
I’ve seen that you’ve actually traveled to Antarctica yourself. Could you tell us a little bit about that experience and what you were there to do?

Cari
I was there as part of the same group, the Antarctic search for meteorites group, which we call ANSMET. I was there twice to collect meteorites on the ice in Antarctica. It’s like six weeks at a time that you go, and you basically spend six weeks in a tent, looking for meteorites, which sounds silly, but it’s true.

Elizabeth
So how does the group determine where to look for these meteorites? Where do you start on such a large continent?

Cari
Right, like you said, it’s a huge continent, and it’s covered in white stuff, right? So, we think like, how do you even see meteorites sitting on the snow, but actually, there are places along the trans Antarctic mountains, which is a range of mountains that basically crosses the continent, where the ice cap for Antarctica is shaped like a dome. And gravity pulls that ice like, just like any glacier, it flows downhill. So the ice gets stuck up against those mountains. And in those places, the wind is really, really strong, and it’s really, really dry there so the ice actually sublimes away. And leaves the meteorites that have fallen and gotten incorporated into that ice just sitting in places, certain places we call stranding surfaces, or stranding fields. You just end up with meteorites sitting there. Sometimes you’ll find 1000s in one place. Sometimes you won’t find any in the same kind of place. We call these blue ice fields where the pressure of that ice being stuck, it pushes out all the bubbles in the ice. The ice turns blue. And you can actually see that by a satellite or airplane images. You can see these blue ice fields and so those are what we target.

Elizabeth
How are you determining whether these rocks that you’re finding are meteorites or just from Earth?

Cari
That’s a really good question, too. Because most of the places we go, we’re right up against those mountains, right? And glaciers do what glaciers do, which is to erode big valleys and carve chunks of the rock off of the mountains and so you do end up with lots of terrestrial rocks sitting there as well. So you’re in a glacial moraine, which is sometimes, you know, is almost all rocks from Earth. So a lot of times you’re walking around, sometimes crawling around, looking at the ground, trying to find any rock that looks different from the rocks that are on the slopes above you or the majority of the rocks that are around. You’d be amazed how quickly your eye can pick up the differences. You know, some of it is coal so that’s pretty obvious, looks different, like black and shiny. But then you’ve got a lot of sort of brown rusty-ish rocks, and you have a few light colored rocks. But then the meteorites have a fusion crust on the outside, which is a layer of glassy melted rock from when it passed through the Earth’s atmosphere. And so for the most part in Antarctica, it’s cold enough that that doesn’t erode away. If that fell in the US anywhere, the rain would erode that off pretty quickly. But in Antarctica, it’s so cold, you know, there’s nothing washing away the outer surfaces of these rocks that you ended up with the fusion crust just staying there and it’s pretty easy to determine which ones are and which ones aren’t. But it does take your eyes some time to get used to it. The program has taken teachers and artists and lots of non-geologists and they do just as well as people who’ve been studying geology their whole life in figuring out which ones are the meteorites pretty quickly.

Elizabeth
That’s really interesting. So then, once you’re finding these meteorites, what’s sort of the next step after you put them like in a bag?

Cari
We try really hard not to touch them so we use tongs and put them in these bags. We give them a number. And we take pictures of them and measure them. We do some little notes about them. Because for the most part, once you’ve looked at enough of them, you can tell roughly what kind of meteorite they are so we’d make little guesses in the notebook. Or if anything, like, oh, somebody touched this with their glove, or somebody accidentally ran over this one with their snowmobile or whatever, you know, just so that people who are then doing research on the meteorites later, will know that something may have happened to the rock that they’re studying. So, they go, back to McMurdo, which is the main U.S. base in Antarctica where we go in and out of the continent. They wait there until the one ship every year leaves the continent, so they stay frozen. We leave them in a cooler. Where we’re camping, it’s frozen anyway, so they’re fine. They go back to the base, they stay frozen, and then the ship is a freezer ship. So, they stay in the freezer part of the ship. They go all the way to Port Hueneme, California. And then they get in a freezer truck. They drive to Houston to the NASA Johnson Space Center, where they stay in a freezer, until they’re thawed out in a nitrogen tank, like a big glove box. So, they’re putting their hands in these gloves, and working with the rocks inside of this glove box with a nitrogen atmosphere that keeps the rocks from weathering or rusting. There’s a lot of metal in most meteorites so it oxidizes really quickly so we try to keep that from happening. And then from there, they send a piece to me at the Smithsonian of every meteorite. They do an external description of the rock and then I figure out what kind of meteorite it is doing chemistry on it. Then we announce it to the world in a newsletter twice a year and say, you know, this six months, we’ve classified 350 New meteorites, and we put them into a catalog online database and people can request them, put in a proposal to do research on them. Then we meet twice a year to review those proposals. We have a group of scientists, volunteer scientists from all over the world who participate in this so there’s eight or so people that rotate in and out. It’s kind of a fair system and it’s not just me every time, saying like, Oh, I don’t want this person that I want to give them anything. It’s a very fair, unbiased process where we look at what they want to do, and whether or not they have the capability to do it. Have they asked us for the wrong meteorite? And they asked us for way too much of a meteorite or wait a minute, we know you can’t do this research without more of this meteorite, so we might have to give them more than they asked for. But then they get sent out to the meteorite researchers all over the world. And people then write papers, do their research, write papers, presented conferences, and hopefully learn new things.

Elizabeth
You mentioned people can publicly request different meteorites sample. What kind of reasons are people requesting those? Are this generally the research all for the same kind of questions? Or are people doing very different things with them? Can you think of like one example, someone might want a sample of a meteorite for?

Cari
So, say they asked for a piece of a Martian meteorite, for example so that’s actually looking at a piece of Mars. And in the minerals that you might find in that rock, you might be able to tell, did these formed in the presence of liquid water or was the environment that they formed in really, really dry? Or if it’s an igneous rock and you’re trying to understand the magma or the lavas would have been like on Mars at the time that it formed? You know, did it all come from one volcanic chamber or did it come from multiple different systems? From the same volcanic region? Basically, trying to figure out how Mars formed as a planet, and how, you know, it’s a whole geologic history. But we’re putting it together from something like 200. I don’t even know the number of Martian meteorites at the moment. It’s in the low hundreds, you know, two or three hundred. So, we’re trying to understand the whole history of a planet from 300 rocks, and many of them are very similar. So, there are some really large groups where you have, you know, a couple 100 or so different rocks of the same type that we think came from the same place. And then are there a few that you have, you know, just one, or just three, or four. So, we have one meteorite from Mars, that’s a breccia, like regolith breccia, from the moon would be. A breccia is a rock made up of lots of different other rock types. So that one in itself gives us just as many rock types as we have in the other groups all together. Just from this one rock so it’s actually really valuable, because we have different rock samples in there that we don’t have in all the other Martian meteorite collections, which is kind of cool. So if we find more of those, that’d be good.

Elizabeth
And so then turning a little more to your role as like a curator of meteorites, which you mentioned. Could you tell us a little bit about what that role sort of means to you? And I guess, with such a large collection that you’re constantly adding to, what does it mean to you to kind of curate that? What are you looking for?

Cari
It’s really exciting to be able to be in charge of this collection, partly because it is growing every single year. All of the meteorites that we have that come back as part of this US government funded program, come to the museum, and are available for research. So that’s one really exciting thing. I just have to make sure that these stay protected from weather, from being too humid, being too hot in the lab, or pest management, you know, the things that people worry about in museums for their samples. Just making sure that they stay in as pristine condition as possible, so that people can do their research. Keeping it so that the instruments that we have now, and the instruments that we might have in 50 or 100 years. I mean, think of the advances in instrumentation. The things that people have been able to learn from the meteorites then that they can’t do now because our instruments can’t do those things. Being able to preserve enough material from each meteorite so that future generations can do their research successfully on the same stuff that we’re working on now and answer more and more and more in-depth questions. That’s one of the most important things about curating, is to sort of make sure that we preserve enough for future generations to be able to see and study themselves. So it’s kind of like being the keeper of the rocks for future generations, which is cool.

Elizabeth
Right. So as like a keeper of the rocks, you can sort of look back on your old collection, but then you’re also getting new ones, how much do you think of your research is like looking back at that older specimens, or the things that are just coming in?

Cari
Almost everything that I do is on older things. Partly because, just like everybody else, if I want to do research on one of the meteorites, I have to request it from the panel. I can look at the thin section. So we make a microscope slide of many of them, like a very like a hair width thin slice of a meteorite that we put on a microscope glass slide. And we can look at that in the microscope. I can look at any of those anytime I want to. So, I could do just research that way. But if I want to put it in an instrument, or do any damage to it, that you know, any analyses that would damage it, or I needed to like chop up a piece or grind it up, or melt it or do any other type of research on it, that would destruct it, then I have to get permission just like everybody else.

A lot of the meteorites are the Antarctic meteorites, but then the Smithsonian also has the rest of the US collection. We try to get pieces of as many of the US meteorites as we can partly because of the US National Collection, so we like to be as representative as we can. We have a lot of really cool meteorites in there that no one’s ever studied at all. You know, and we kind of dig through the drawers and see what’s there and what looks cool. So, a lot of it is us looking through some of this older stuff. But the classification of every new meteorite means that we do see a lot of the new stuff that comes in, and we follow the research that other people are doing that can answer some of those questions that we might not have the instruments to study.

Elizabeth
How often are you getting meteorites that you can sort of attribute to a known asteroid or area and how often are you getting ones that could be from anywhere?

Cari
That’s a really good question and how often isn’t so much as how like the percentages and how many. It’s like maybe 99% are from just asteroids. We can tell you that it’s a carbonaceous asteroid or not. But things like the moon, or the ones from Vesta, or the ones from Mars, those make up like 1% of all meteorites. So, one out of every 100, maybe. But sometimes you’ll get a season’s full of meteorites, where they happen to have found a disproportionately large number of those, just because that randomly happens to be what’s there. So, if you go to a field site, and you find 500 meteorites at that field site, chances are you’re going to find more things that don’t fall into that 99% and 1%. Sort of pie chart, you know, pie. But the more meteorites you find from every place, like we find that the meteorites we found are the field sites where we found something in 1000s of pieces. that pie chart almost always ends up looking the same. When you get more and more and more that pie chart eventually sort of meshes into the same proportions.

Elizabeth
So then, are there any particularly unique meteorites in the collection? I know you mentioned some from the moon, that kind of thing. What are some of the most I guess, useful ones for your studies?

Cari
There are Antarctic meteorites from Mars. We have one that’s called Allen Hills 84001 that I did all of my dissertation work on. It has carbonate minerals in it. And carbonate minerals require water, liquid water to form. It’s also an igneous rock, so that rock formed in some igneous way. You know, it was probably solidified below the surface. It’s not just a basalt, it’s, you know, some subsurface igneous rock. But then, an impact happened, like from an asteroid hitting Mars surface, and mess that rock up, heated it up, broke it up, melted parts of it, and fractured it, and shot melted rock into those veins into those fractures. And then we think probably that some water got in there. And then these carbonate minerals grew. So, for just from that one rock, you can learn about the igneous history, you can learn about the impact history, you can learn about the aqueous history of this area, you know, just this one spot on Mars. So that’s a really cool one. It’s called Allen Hills 84001. And Antarctic meteorites have this naming convention where the first three letters are, where it was found. The numbers are 84001. 84 is when it was found, 1984. And then 0-0-1 was the first meteorite opened in the lab when they brought it back, because they knew it was a different one. It was big and different from all the other meteorites that they’d found. So, they knew that was an exciting one. We have plenty of moon rocks, lots of lunar rocks, that are different than Apollo rocks, because the Apollo rocks, we know exactly where they came from. So, we only have so many sampling sites from the surface of the moon. But we don’t know where the meteorites came from. So those give us a broader representation of the surface of the moon, then samples that we were brought back by the Apollo astronauts.

Elizabeth
Very cool.

Cari
I feel like the special meteorites always get all the attention. But the group of 99% is broken up into carbonaceous chondrites, and ordinary chondrites. Those can tell us tons. Carbonaceous chondrites have tons and tons of really, really primitive materials in them, that formed very early in the solar system. And probably from out farther, you know, away from the Sun than the ordinary chondrites did. And so, you know, we can learn a lot about what the really primitive solar system material and sort of how the early solar system disk, how that was constructed in terms of what kind of materials were there. There’s an interesting theory that is says that maybe at some point, when the planets were all forming, there was something happened. I think, it’s Neptune and Uranus switched places and that gravitational, unbalanced, like, completely brought tons of material toward the Sun. And so, a lot of that intercepted Earth so we have more meteorites than from out there than we may have otherwise. Which is kind of cool. It is hard to think about. It’s hard to think about planets switching places. It’s kind of a wild and crazy theory, but I think there’s a lot of evidence that it might be right.

[music]

Elizabeth
We hope you enjoyed hearing about the curation of meteorites from Cari. Please visit Longitude [dot] site for the episode transcript.

If you are around Houston this spring, be sure to stop by the Rice University library to view our exhibition of photographs from the Antarctica expeditions. Our exhibit will be available for display at other university libraries upon request as well.

If you are a college student interested in leading conversations like this for our next podcast, please write to us at podcast@longitude.site.

Join us next time for more unique insights on Longitude Sound Bytes.

 

 

Emory Mckenzie
Welcome to Longitude Sound Bytes, where we bring innovative insights from around the world directly to you.

As part of our new series focusing on expeditions and the roles of individuals who are advancing science through explorations in harsh environments, our conversations aim to shed light on fascinating projects that help us understand our planet and make life on earth better.

I am Emory Mckenzie, a graduate student at Rice University pursing my masters in Earth Science.

For this episode, I had an opportunity to speak with Dr. Ralph Harvey, principal investigator of the Antarctic Meteorite Search Program for over 30 years!

Ralph is a professor of planetary sciences in the Department of Earth, environment and Planetary Sciences at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. He has been running the US Antarctic meteorite search program since the early 90s.

I’ve learned that going to Antarctica is no easy feat.  He speaks about the harsh conditions and small windows of opportunities each year for these meteorite searches. 

We begin our conversation with how and why the meteorite searches started, and how Dr. Harvey got involved in them while being a grad student. 

Ralph Harvey
Basically, way back in 1969, some Japanese glaciologist stumbled on the first concentration of Antarctic meteorites. They had been found before, kind of serendipitously by people exploring the continent. In fact, the first one was found in 1912 by some guys. They had dog sleds and woolen canvas clothing. They were Australians, and they were just kind of crossing a bit of ice and there was a meteorite laying there. They knew it had to have fallen from the sky. There wasn’t any terrestrial rocks around, it was just snow for 100 miles in every direction. But this Japanese group in 1969 stumbled across nine of them, stretched out over kind of about a kilometer or so. They weren’t 100% sure that anything interesting was going on but my PhD advisor, the late Bill Cassidy, had seen a talk about this find, and then later on, saw a talk where they described the rocks. There were five different kinds of rocks amongst those meteorites. Some of them were relatively rare types of meteorites. And he had one of those eureka moments. You know, he did the math in his head, and said, nine meteorites but a couple of them are kind of one and thousand kind of meteorites, there must be a boatload more of them out there. He ran up to the Japanese speakers and said, do you know what you’ve got? This is a treasure trove and it’s out there somewhere! And so, the Japanese researchers went right back. In the next year, they found like 40, in the next year, they found like 500, in the next year, they found like 1000. Meanwhile, Bill Cassidy had been trying to get the US Antarctic program to start a search, and the US Antarctic program said, there is no such thing, you’re dreaming, you know, but after a few years of watching the Japanese strike gold, so to speak, they turned around and they said, Okay, go look for some. That was the first year of our project in 1976. We have been going into field, basically continuously since then. And with the pandemic, the last couple of years, it is the third one we’ve missed in a row because of pandemic related stops. That’s where the project comes from. I was a graduate student of Bill Cassidy’s at the University of Pittsburgh in the late 80s. Got my PhD in 1990 and ended up essentially adopting the program or inheriting it might be a better word, started leading the field parties in 1991, and I’ve been the PI, the principal investigator, since. In fact, I’m going to step back from that leadership in just a few months. A guy named Jim Karner is going to take over the functional leadership.

Emory
So typically, how long are the field seasons?

Ralph
Well, we’re working in Antarctica and Antarctica has reverse seasons than the north hemisphere, right. It’s called the Austral summer that runs from kind of November through February. We are working high up on the East Antarctic Ice Sheet at altitudes the equivalent of… pressure altitude would be about 10,000 feet, the functional altitudes like 2500 meters, 2200 meters. So, we’re way up there. The winds are incredibly fierce. There’s nothing to stop the winds. And these are katabatic winds, they call them. They just scour the edges of the ice sheet and blow away all the snow and stuff. We try to get out there. When those katabatic winds are starting to die down. We can’t go out there just when the sun rises because that wind is howl. We’re talking periods of continuous 80 mile an hour wind for two weeks. I’m not talking gusts, I’m talking continuous, right? It’s pretty much like a hurricane that doesn’t pass through. It’s a hurricane that just keeps going for weeks and weeks and weeks.

Generally, we get to our field sites kind of the first week of December and spend about six weeks. So, we usually have a resupply mission in the middle. We’ll have a plane drop in to bring us any extra fuel we need any snowmobile parts, whatever, whatever’s broke, they can bring us to replacement. But other than we’re self-sufficient. We get out there with everything we need and we’re just out there camping for about six weeks. We still have those winds. Generally, we count on losing about 40% of our field season to winds that are just too high for us. The snow starts moving. You can’t see the ground in front of you. You can’t see the meteorites. So we’re all kind of hiding in our tents. And some of those storms can be 7-10 days, they can be pretty brutal, but more often it’s two or three days. We count on, maybe in a given work week, we’re happy if we get four of those days are full workdays. Sometimes we get a month that’s gorgeous, it’s the weather, right? It’s not fully predictable. And we are very much subject to it, you know, we’re out there, more exposed probably than almost any other Antarctic field team.

Emory
So, what’s like the threshold? You wake up one morning and the winds are gusting but it’s not too bad. So, what makes it too bad?

Ralph
It’s the visibility, really. We measure the wind. We put out weather stations stuff. You get about the equivalent of about 20 knots, which could be like 22 miles an hour. It starts to get to the point where there’s enough moving snow that your visibility’s going down. By the time you hit about 25, it’s pretty much time to go home. And of course, it’s very uncomfortable too, right. Our primary tool for finding the meteorites is their eyeballs and being able to look around put your face in the direction of the wind, that’s pretty critical for us. So if people are like pulling their hoods over and trying to look out a little slot in the hood, that’s, we understand that it’s not just the visibility of the meteorites, it is how well a human can search in those conditions as well. Because the weather can change pretty quickly. It’s not unusual for us to kind of work a half day when the conditions are marginal.

Emory
How do you choose who goes into the field?

Ralph
The process by which we select people, I’m gonna give you a little history first. The Antarctic meteorite program, after the first finds came back, my predecessor Bill Cassidy, had plans to bring the rocks back to Pittsburgh. But he also realized that every other museum, every other school, anybody could write the same proposal and say, oh, I am a doctor now, let’s  go get some meteorites for ourselves. In that, it was going to become a disaster because the US Antarctic Program wasn’t going to fund all of them. They were going to find maybe one a year. The meteorites would be scattered all over the place. Each different college, each different museum having a couple of dozen and that’s it. So, it wasn’t going to really help science that much, it was going to help individuals. And he made a very clever, altruistic decision, which was, he got together with the best meteorite labs out there; the Smithsonian, and the Johnson Space Center’s lab that used to handle the moon rocks. Of course, the Apollo program had been done for about five years by then. And they made a deal. The basic deal became to be called “the three-agency agreement”. What it said was Bill Cassidy would lead the fieldwork to pick up the meteorites, they would then go to the Johnson Space Center where they do initial characterization, and then the Smithsonian would do long-term curation and help with the characterization. And in exchange for kind of having these guaranteed jobs, everybody would give up their rights to the samples. No archaeologist studying cities in the Amazon would say, Oh, look at this great city I just found, why don’t I invite everybody else to profit from it? Nobody would do that, right. But in the case of the meteorites, Bill Cassidy was brilliant. Because he had a sense that they were going to be not just 1000s, but 10s of 1000s of them. It would have been more toys than he could ever do anything with, that also helped the project survive to this day, because it meant that other people could make the initial important discoveries.

The way this interacts with the field party selection, is that by the time I came on board, we realized that sharing not just the samples, but sharing the field experience could do the same thing for us in the long term. And so I set a policy where we would accept volunteers. It’s not a democracy. It’s not first come first serve. We have our priorities, right. But the idea was that we would accept volunteers, anybody that said they could deal with it could write me a letter. Now, it would go to Jim Karner at Utah, and explain to us what they would get from it. We gave the highest priority, we still do, we give the highest priority to people that are actually doing research on Antarctic meteorites. But that’s not a very deep list. You know, next priority would come to people that are in related fields, like planetary geology, or mineralogy, or whatever, that also have maybe field experience that we need. But we don’t throw any letter away. We would take one from someone who’s interpretive dancer, if they can compel to us the value of their participation. Not just for us, but for the community as a whole. We, in fact, had some writers go with us, which was good. We’ve had astronauts go with us. That would be part of their training for extreme environments. We’ve also been very, very careful to try and make it as diverse as we could, taking people from all around the world. I don’t know how many countries are represented right now but I think it’s about 45, there is a lot of countries. Gender, race, all of that we try to have that as balanced as we can. But anyway, so it’s not a democracy, we look at these letters every year.

The letters have to be on paper. That’s turned out to be an awesome, big hurdle for most people in the modern era, right? Anybody can shoot off an email or a tweet or a text and say, oh, yeah, man, this is what I’ve always wanted to do. But most of the time you make him sit down and put it on paper and write and find an envelope with a stamp. A lot of people who stop right there and say, you know, wait a minute, this seems a wee bit like I’m being official, I’m not just expressing my curiosity anymore. I’m saying I’ll do it, if you invite me. We get about 100 letters a year. Opportunities are very limited, you know, our typical field size is eight. We want half of those people to be veterans. Now that would involve one or two of us, a mountaineer, and one of the leadership team. Sometimes two mountaineers, and then the rest, if at all possible, we fill with newbies. In recent years that means one, two or three people a year, which isn’t that much in real terms but it’s phenomenal by this stage. There’s probably, I think we’re over 200 Different people across the scientific community that have been with us in Antarctica, had this experience and it is generally described as a life changing experience.

Patience is the key. So, if you yourself want to write a letter, you write the letter. What’s really smart, though, is to make sure that you don’t say, I could go any time, or I want to go right now. I love it. Love it, love it. Now, what do you want to do is say, I’m a grad student, I’m gonna finish in 2024. 2025 sounds pretty good to me and here’s my skills, and this is why I want to do it. We look at all those letters every year. Again, not first come first serve, not a democracy. We construct a field team that we think is going to be positive, that is going to be able to deal with the isolation, and the physical hardships, and is going to be so jazzed about the meteorites themselves, that getting out to work every day or doing nasty stuff when it’s super cold, they’re never going to say not today. They’re always going to say, please, I’ll do more.

Emory
What is like the operating procedure for sampling? So how do you move around on the ice sheets? How are you choosing positions for sampling?

Ralph
The meteorite concentrations that have been found so far, are on very old surfaces, what we call blue ice. It is blue, it is deep glacial ice that is in places where the ice sheet is eroding because of these fierce winds because very, very dry air. The ice sheet is eroding down into ice several 100 meters down where you’re seeing bubble free blue ice. Just like deep, deep, clear water. All around the edges of these Antarctic ice sheet there are places like this, where that flow is then hindered by the presence of submerged mountains or emergent mountains. Basically, the equivalent of ice cul-de-sacs where the ice flows in and either has to throw out so slowly, that loss mechanisms like the fierce winds like a one sunny, warm day, where those loss mechanisms succeed any input from ice flow or falling snow or whatever. And when you have a surface like that, what you have is effectively, we call it an ablation surface because it’s losing material. If that surface is stable for 10s, of 1000s of years, hundreds of 1000 years, even millions of years, the meteorites that are falling from the sky just tend to build up there. And that’s probably most of what’s happening. They don’t get buried on these sites because there’s not much precipitation. You can get a lot of meteorites built up on every square kilometer. And given that there are hundreds of these kinds of sites, and some of them are quite extensive, finding the ones that have been this way, and that stable, is a big part of our job.

In the early days, they just flew around with an airplane and looked around. Satellite imagery really changed all that for us. Now we can look all across the continent in very high resolution, and kind of see these blue ice areas. And then we look at the setting of the blue ice areas. It’s got to be high enough, where the average temperature is really, really cold, like minus 15 minus 20 degrees Celsius. If it gets too much warmer than that meteorites can heat up and kind of thermally tunneled down into the ice. We’re not going to dig in for meteorites, when there’s other places where they’re, they’re piled out.

The first job for us as a research project, is to kind of locate these places, and prioritize them. The second job is to put boots on the ice and go look at the rocks that are on the ice and see if they’re really meteorites. In ideal circumstances, there are no terrestrial rocks there, you know, it’s a place where all the terrestrial stuff is downhill and downwind. Those are awesome, right? Any meteorite, any rock, you see sitting on the ice had to fall from the sky. So, it’s almost certainly a meteorite. Those areas where the gold mines of the first 20 years of the project. At the time I was in a leadership role, we were finding more and more of them in places that were like downwind traps and other things like that. And so nowadays, that’s a more likely place where we would spend significant parts of a field season. Places where the meteorites sat on the ice, but then they got blown downwind by these fierce winds and all of that.

So, a very big part of our job is, is learning to tell terrestrial rocks from meteorites. Turns out that the human brain is really pretty good at that. Rocks falling from space have a burnt outer crust, so they look different in terms of their exterior texture and color. And once your brain is kind of memorized with the rocks around, the normal terrestrial rocks around are like, your brain is really good at kind of just ruling those out. And we found that even people that are really not rock people can learn to tell terrestrial rock from a meteorite with about a day or two a training, it really doesn’t take a lot. And we really trust that because what we found is, when we use metal detectors or something else that’s a little more sophisticated, people tend to get a little bit of tunnel vision. The human eye-brain system is so evolved to notice things that are a little different, than when you focus on like the signal from a metal detector. Or you focus on a needle on a dial, you lose a lot of that you become one dimensional, and we don’t want to do that, because a lot of the best meteorites to be found look a whole lot like a terrestrial rock but there’s just some little difference, you know.

Emory
Would you describe the burnt outer crust of the meteorites?

Ralph
It looks a lot like a charcoal briquette. You know, what’s happening is the meteorites are sitting out in space at like 17 degrees Kelvin, I mean, it’s incredibly cold. And when they hit the Earth’s atmosphere, they’re going brutally fast. We are talking 1000s of miles per hour. The result is that all that kinetic energy, by the time it hits the atmosphere, even the tenuous little molecules in the outer atmosphere, they’re hitting like little grenades. Rocks don’t transmit heat very well. They don’t conduct heat basically at all. So the friction that develops becomes fireballs we see at night. The inside of the rock is still 17 degrees Kelvin. The result is that these rocks when they do finally get to the surface of the Earth, almost inevitably have this thin coating, a millimeter or two, basically bubbly blasts. It’s usually black simply because it’s got all the elements that are in the meteorite kind of mixed together and dust. And, it’s black. It can be matte or it can be really pretty glossy glass depending on what melted. But the point is, it’s this black outer coating. Meanwhile, the inside can be very different. It can be bright white, colored gray or green or whatever. So when we see a rock, that’s like, rounded corners like a charcoal briquette, black, and kind of matte on the outside, and particularly if we see corners knocked off, and the inside is a completely different color. Bingo. It’s probably a meteorite. That said, some of these have been sitting on Earth for 200,000 years, and the fierce winds and everything can knock that fusion crust off. Sometimes all you see is the inside. Sometimes they almost kind of look terrestrial. That’s another reason we like to have veterans on the program, right? Because the newbies figure out the fuse compressing really pretty quick. But there are other types rarer types of meteorites that we don’t want to miss that, we hope the newbie says, This doesn’t look right. It doesn’t look like a meteorite to me but it does have some of those features. And you call over a veteran, they say, Holy cow, you found a piece of the moon! So that fusion crust is the number one thing kind of we’re looking for. There are other ways to tell something is a meteorite, right? The most common ones to fall have metal in them. So, a metal detector could do that. But the fancy ones that we really care about, like a rock from Mars, they don’t have any metal in them. They look like a volcanic rock, which Antarctic is covered with so we don’t want to miss those. And again, we stick with the trust of the human eye brain system, totally intuitive but they know it’s there.

Emory
Intuition is probably, not even probably, it is my favorite thing about geology. Sometimes you look at things, what you are looking at what you have that this is different from this, and that means something.

Ralph
Yeah, and just to stretch that a little further, we’re getting off in Arctic meteorites, but I’ve been teaching for a long time. A corollary to that is geology isn’t math. And it’s not physics. You can have two rocks that look exactly alike, and they have completely different origins, right? Different history, a different, you know, how did they get that way? Well, this one, sat in the Appalachians for 500,000 years and got rounded in a stream. This other one over here is four and a half billion years old. Geology is not an exact science. And it’s not two plus two always equals four. For us, four can happen a lot of different ways. And so you’re right. And it’s a reason that most of the geologists that make kind of geology changing discoveries, they’re the ones that have seen so many rocks, so many outcrops and everything, that they understand just how complex it will be, and they’re willing to let their intuition guide them toward the best solution out of 100 that are possible.

Emory
So you mentioned rare meteorites, what question are you trying to answer when you’re looking at these meteorites, and what would make a meteorite rare?

Ralph
About 90 to 92% of our type of meteorite we call ordinary chondrites. They seem to represent material that goes all the way back to the origins of the solar system, when there was this nebula of gas and dust, it started spinning together and under gravity forming the sun. And during that process, little grains of dust became bigger dust bunnies, became little bits of gravel, etc. And eventually, in some cases built up to be planets and the sun itself. And most ordinary chondrites have a composition very similar to the Sun itself. And so we argue that they represent this very earliest stage in the history of the solar system. That’s most of the meteorites that fall, they’re still really important, even if they’re not super rare. That said, most of those ordinary chondrites probably come from the asteroids in the asteroid belt, but some of them get knocked off bigger bodies, things that were almost planets, and some of them like we’ve described comes off full blown planets. We’ve got pieces of Mars, the Moon, and maybe technically not a planet, but it’s big enough.

Emory
What are the size of those samples, like, how big are those samples?

Ralph
Any of those that have undergone, let’s call it planetary processing, they are telling us about how planets evolved. They’re they’re giving us samples with different starting conditions, different sized planet, different amount of heat, different, maybe even different starting composition, right. So, these only make up 5% of what seemed to fall. But for those geologists that are really into the look for life on Mars, a Martian meteorite is awesome, that’s, it’s the best you’re going to do in terms of working on a real sample, right? There’s something on the order of about 100, Mars meteorites that are known now.

And then, on top of that, for some specimens, the rarest of the rare, they not only tell us about the formation of the rock, the lithology we’re looking at, but they may have secondary minerals on them. That original lithology may have interacted with the environment of its parent body, whether it’s Mars or an asteroid or whatever later on. And so suddenly, we begin to learn about the environmental conditions that were extant in the surface of that planet. You can dish out a lot of information from samples, and that’s one of the drivers for us to continue to do this recovery of the specimens in Antarctica. It is a place where, on average, we can bring back four or 500 specimens every year that are new to science. And while 90% of them may be stuff, very similar to what’s been found before, the only way we’re going to find stuff new is to keep doing it. That alone makes it worth it to the scientific community.

Emory
Are you able to take any samples for yourself?

Ralph
No, in fact, in fact, that’s part of the deal I was talking about this kind of altruistic deal that Bill Cassidy set up. It actually goes further than that, you know. I don’t dare be seen having a meteorite collection myself. That goes so counter to the spirit of what this project is supposed to be about. I love meteorites, but it’s the sacrifice that had to be made for me to be able to run this program for so long. It’s so fundamental to our purpose, right? That what we are doing is recovering these specimens for other people to make discoveries. Not for us, and certainly not for us to put on the mantle above the fireplace, like a trophy.

[music]

Emory
We hope you enjoyed our episode. Please visit Longitude [dot] site for the episode transcript.

This spring our podcast episodes are accompanied by an exhibit of photographs from the Antarctica expeditions at the Rice University library. Our exhibit will be available for display at other university libraries upon request.

If you are a college student interested in leading conversations for our next podcast series, please write to us at podcast@longitude.site.

Thank you for your time and we invite you to join us next time for more unique insights on Longitude Sound Bytes.

 

 

Laurel Chen
Welcome to Longitude Sound Bytes, where we bring innovative insights from around the world directly to you.

We are embarking on a new series of episodes as part of our focus on expeditions and the roles of individuals who are advancing science explorations in harsh environments. From polar regions, deserts, oceans, to space, our conversations aim to shed light on fascinating projects that help us understand our planet and make life on earth better.

I am Laurel Chen, a graduate student at Rice University pursing my masters of global medical innovation.

Recently I had an opportunity to speak with Linda Welzenbach Fries, a science writer and photographer who has been part of several expeditions in Antarctica. While working at the Smithsonian Institution she joined the Antarctic Meteorite Search program twice!

This spring we are featuring an exhibit of her photographs from these expeditions at the Rice University library and our podcast series will present conversations that provide details. You could see some of the photos on our series web page Longitude.site.

We start this episode with the serendipitous path that led Linda to Smithsonian first, then to her current role at Rice University.

Linda Welzenbach Fries
I am the science writer at Rice University in the Department of Earth, environmental and planetary sciences. And I got this job because of my previous career as a museum curator at the Smithsonian Institution where I curated meteorites. I am a geologist, that’s my background. And I started at the Smithsonian, in public programs, working on a brand-new exhibit on minerals, gems, rocks, and meteorites. From there, I was able to segue into my position in collections, specifically meteorites, and I did that for about 15 years. It was funny, because when I started in that position, I was asked whether or not I’d be willing to go to Antarctica, would this be something that I would be interested in? And of course, I said yes, because who doesn’t want to go to Antarctica? That was essentially a really good sort of way to appreciate the collection that I was managing, because 75% of the meteorites that are currently in the Smithsonian collection come from the US Antarctic meteorite program. That program is interesting in that it is an unusual collaboration between NASA, the Smithsonian Institution, and the National Science Foundation. It began in 1976-77 and has essentially been ongoing ever since. They’ve collected somewhere close to 40 or 50,000 meteorites as a part of that program.

The U.S. Antarctic meteorite program, known as ANSMET, goes to Antarctica, usually after Thanksgiving and spends about seven weeks on the ice collecting meteorites. It is run through a principal investigator at a university. They get funding currently from NASA. There are usually somewhere in the neighborhood of six to eight team members, all of them are typically scientists from the planetary science community. It’s a volunteer activity. No experience is needed, except you have to like camping remotely. No showers. You have to eat food that sometimes is about a year old because it takes that long for a boat to go from California to Antarctica in the offseason. Of course, everything’s frozen so it stores well.

Laurel
My next question was just how your education led you on the path that you are today. It really seems like you, you got a great opportunity to just go down there. That’s, that’s amazing.

Linda
So, the truth is, my background as a geologist is in sedimentology. I went to Bowling Green State University in Ohio, and I was in the library. It was like January, late January, maybe early February, and I was leafing through a magazine called Geo Times. And in the back of the Geo Times Magazine, there was an advertisement to work at the Smithsonian Institution. I have wanted to be a geologist since I was about seven years old. My uncle was a mineral collector, and he gave me my very first minerals, and I would save all my pennies, and I would go to mineral shows, and I would buy minerals. And I used to go to the Smithsonian, you know, when I was a kid and look at the mineral collections, and I thought this would be such an amazing job. And so when I saw the advertisement in the back of Geo Times magazine, I was super excited. The date due for the application was in two days – now this is the early 90s – there is very little in the way of email. There was a telephone number. So I actually picked up the phone and I cold-called the number and I said, this is the job for me. And I talked to the person on the other side, who turns out was going to be my boss. I convinced her that I was the right person for the job. She said, fax me all your material, I will make sure that it gets to human resources in time. I waited many months. I didn’t hear whether I got the job until the end of May. I had defended my master’s thesis. I was ready, essentially to work in Detroit, Michigan when I finally got the call, and I and I said yes. And so I started working in public programs on the new mineral Hall, which is a dream job. I got to handle all the minerals and gems that are currently on display at the Smithsonian right now. And, working in with the minerals and working in collections is essentially what enabled me to segue into the meteorite collections manager curation position. And then the rest is history.

Laurel
That’s amazing. I’m so happy to hear that for you, in that how you really set yourself to do something when you were young and everything kind of fell into place, and I definitely am an appreciator of museums, especially natural history museum so and just to think that curators are behind the scenes who put those, sort of exhibitions together is just really fascinating to me. And we appreciate it from the viewers perspective, it’s always cool to see it come together.

Linda
Indeed, you learn a lot about actually how difficult it is to put a coherent exhibit together. How the selection process for all the minerals and the gems and how they fit into the story that you want to tell.

Laurel
Could you please tell us about what’s the history behind both the Antarctic project as well as the meteorite search project in laypersons terms?

Linda
Meteorites fall equally all over the planet. What is the planet covered with primarily? The ocean, so a lot of that material is lost. Antarctica is the largest continent that we have. It’s also been covered with ice for a very, very long time. And so, a lot of scientists have been doing work just studying ice and ice movement. And in 1969, there was a Japanese glaciologist, who spent a lot of time on the ice who actually found meteorites. And the meteorites were relatively close to each other, they were kind of clustered together. And yet they were a variety of different types.

Most meteorites that actually fall to Earth fall as single individual, or potentially as a shower of stones. The dynamics of actually an asteroid hitting? earth, and the cosmic velocity in which that it passes through the Earth’s atmosphere causes a lot of pressure to build up on that rock, and then that rock explodes typically, and rains down on the surface as a shower of stones, if it’s big enough. A lot of the smaller material just either burns up in the atmosphere, or if it’s coherent enough, it can actually just fall as one stone on the ground.

Well in Antarctica, what they sort of hypothesized was, in order to get a bunch of individual different kinds of meteorites that are all located relatively proximal to each other, and we’re talking just a few meters apart, there has to be a mechanism that concentrates the meteorites. They presented this information at a meeting. And one of the US planetary scientists was very intrigued by this. His name was Bill Cassidy. He thought, well, maybe I can get funding from the National Science Foundation to go and do my own search and test out this hypothesis, this potential concentration mechanism. And it took a couple of rounds of proposing, but he did get some funding to do a preliminary search. And he actually worked with the Japanese initially, and they were able to recover meteorites, and this was in 1976. Most proposals are a several year sort of award and he was able to go out several more times and collect more meteorites. He had a graduate student. His name was Ralph Harvey, who ultimately ended up becoming the principal investigator for the US Antarctic meteorite program, or ANSMET, and was able to successfully manage this program to the present day.

Antarctica, being at the at the south pole has a fair amount of curvature. And the ice as it builds up in the center part of the continent near the pole, basically, through gravity moves out towards the margins. And as it does this, we’re talking ice that several, you know, kilometers thick. And the meteorites that essentially have been falling on that ice equally over millions of years are carried up to the surface, and then are exposed. And in places where the ice kind of becomes stagnant, like it gets blocked by the mountain range. Those meteorites can accumulate, we can get hundreds or 1000s of meteorites in these really interesting little pockets of stagnant ice movement.

They have learned that these areas typically are blue ice. Blue ice is essentially ice in which has been compressed to the point where all the oxygen has been pushed out of it. And so it becomes very dark, and it re-radiates the blue color. They’ve used satellite imagery to look for these areas of blue ice, and then target their searches for these areas. And the US Antarctic meteorite program has been primarily focusing along the Trans-Arctic Mountain range, because that is proximal to both McMurdo Station flights and flights from South Pole. And so a lot of it is the infrastructure that is available to help them, you know, put them in the field, which is a very expensive and logistically difficult process.

We’ve been able to collect so many meteorites, [so] statistically, we’ve been able to identify new types of meteorites each and every year that we go because we’ve been able to collect so many. One thing that was really interesting is we found literally the first meteorites from the Moon and Mars from the Antarctic collections. The moon meteorites are the ones that helped us identify the first meteorites from Mars. The Apollo program returned all this material from the moon, so we had material that we could identify as being lunar, what’s more interesting, though, is because meteorites from the moon, basically come from all over the moon, we actually have pieces of the moon that are not sampled by the Apollo program.

Laurel
Wow, that’s super cool. I had no idea that you can learn so much from meteorites.

Linda
Meteorites are essentially snapshots from the earliest history of our solar system. Most of the material from the asteroid belt is residual material from when the planets were actively forming and evolving. They give us an idea of what maybe the earth was like, the moon was like, and what Mars was like, in the earliest history [of] their formation, because at present, Earth is still evolving.

Laurel
I like that. That’s a really good analogy. They’re quite literally pictures in time. And they’re their little windows into the past, and that you have them in physical manifestation.

Linda
And the really nice thing is, we haven’t collected them all. And each year that we go, we get one new type of meteorite that we’ve never seen before. And we all do this at a fraction of the cost of any kind of, you know, sample return mission from space.

Laurel
It seems like these searches are pretty collaborative, not only between NASA, Smithsonian and the National Science Foundation. I’m kind of curious what skill sets are essential when working on such a large mission like this and, and how do they work together at the end of the day, so seamlessly.

Linda
In any one of these this Antarctic meteorite program, there is the principal investigator, who has essentially been working in this program for a very long time, has a lot of experience working in Antarctica. Also included is a safety officer or what we call a mountaineer. That person has very specific skill sets that enable that person to make sure that everybody that goes to the ice remains safe.

The scientists that participate have no experience whatsoever. In fact, a lot of them have only worked on tiny pieces of meteorites and have no idea what an actual meteorite looks like. Some people have never been camping. But for the most part, I think everybody who goes is enthusiastic enough that regardless of their level of skill with outdoor experience, they learn a lot while they are there.

We do occasionally leverage the experience of NASA astronauts because they are physically qualified. There is actually a rigorous set of tests that everybody has to pass because there are no doctors or surgeons. And we are out in in a remote setting for a very long period of time. And so we want to make sure that nobody is going to have some kind of illness that may require extraordinary measures to get them out. Like, you know, bringing a plane in, or a helicopter, although a helicopter can only basically be used when the camp is within, obviously, helicopter range.

So, astronauts are nice because if somebody doesn’t physically qualify, and we’ve reached very close to the deadline where everybody has to get out in the field, we have them available. They also see it as an opportunity to train the astronauts themselves on how to work in isolated conditions, how to work well with others.

We sometimes include scientists from other programs. We’ve had scientists from Japan, scientists from China, and from other European countries who participate so that they can get a feel for what this program is, and maybe perhaps how to develop their own programs. And in fact, over the last decade, 15 to 20 years, there has been a Chinese Antarctic meteorite collecting program called CHINARE. There’s another one that is a Belgian focused, they actually work very closely with NIPR or the Japanese polar programs to collect meteorites. Euromet, was another one where there were the Italians and the British, I think.

Laurel
Sounds like a very, very international effort from what I’m hearing with all these places around the world. Super cool that you mentioned that.

Now, I’m kind of curious about the expeditions itself. I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit more about what a typical day usually looks like during the search and how long these expeditions usually are in general.

Linda
When you are selected to be a team member, the first thing you have to do is you have to physically qualify. From there, you’re given a list of clothing that you have to take with you. And there are weight restrictions. So, you are allowed to bring upwards of 75 pounds with you. And they want you to select clothing that will keep you warm and dry. The National Science Foundation as part of their polar programs will supply you with the primary cold weather gear or emergency cold weather gear or what they call ECW gear. That gear is actually issued to you when you arrive at the polar programs depot which is in Christchurch. You spend probably two hours trying a whole bunch of things on because it has to fit well. If it doesn’t fit well, you will get cold. And being cold is a very bad thing obviously in Antarctica.

So, you take with you like you know your long underwear that’s close to the skin, but then they will give you fleece, they give you pants or overalls. And then they give you a parka and they give you very special boots. That gear, believe it or not, is worn when you get on a plane that goes from New Zealand to Antarctica.

All of the US program participants fly from Christchurch, New Zealand to McMurdo Station Antarctica. That flight takes anywhere from five to eight hours depending on what plane you use. You wear all that gear. You’re inside this sort of essentially a cargo plane, which is not heated. You literally get off the plane and you step onto the sea ice. And that’s about a half an hour ride from where you get off the plane to McMurdo Station.

Once you’re there, you know the temperature- the weather- is somewhere in the neighborhood of like between 15 degrees Fahrenheit, to several degrees below zero. Then you assemble everything that you need, to go and camp out on what we call the Antarctic Plateau.

There is a specific set of equipment that you go and you collect. Everybody participates in not only selecting it, but packing it and getting it ready to be essentially loaded on a plane. And that includes things like your tent that you’re going to live in. These tents are called Scott tents. They’re canvas and wood. They’re double walled, they’re a nine by nine square at the bottom and then taper up to the top. It has these little vent holes at the top. This nine by nine tent, this thing called a Scot tent is essentially unchanged in almost 150 years. It’s crazy. The tent itself is open on the bottom, the rubber tarp goes directly on top of the ice, then the tent goes down on top of that. And then you literally just put in several layers of foam rubber and Therm-a-Rests, and you literally sleep in your sleeping bag right on top of those on top of the ice.

Laurel
Wow, talk about bare minimal harsh environment.

Linda
It is primitive camping at its absolute best. And then you heat the tent essentially with the stove that you cook on. And that actually can get the tent pretty nice and warm, it can get into the you know, maybe the mid 60s, maybe the upper 70s, a little bit warmer at the top of the tent. And then there’s air vents obviously to prevent any kind of gas buildup because you’re using liquid fuel to run your stove. Yeah, so in that nine-by-nine plan, one set of sleeping bags goes on one side, the other set of sleeping bag you there’s two people to attend. And so, both of us essentially lay out our sleeping bags on each side. And then all the cooking goes on in the very center.

Laurel
Like dorm living.

Linda
It is definitely like dorm living. Yeah, there’s pockets on the inside of the tents where you can store all of your gloves and pins and put pictures up in the center of the tent so that you can like see your loved ones. Going out into the field at the beginning of December and coming back at the end of January, it’s a long time to be living in a tent with one person, missing your loved ones.

If you’re an introvert, it’s a really great activity. If you’re an extrovert, some people sometimes have a little hard time seeing the same people day in and day out. It is very remote in the terms of the fact that there are no trees, you can’t really go outside and get away from people or go very far because it’s unsafe to do so. You know, unless you’re moving around a lot, you can get cold. So, you have to find other ways to entertain yourselves. These days, they now have solar panels that will allow you to charge your computer so you know everything stays warm enough you can actually watch you know movies in your tent with your computer. The first time I went we only had one satellite phone among all of us because of the time and energy it took to charge it up. The second time I went every tent had a satellite phone. The last time I went was in 2006 and I know that each year I you know the equipment gets lighter and smaller and it’s more efficient to charge it.

Laurel
What usually happens afterwards, how are the meteorites stored? And eventually how does that reach? When you’re back at the Smithsonian or wherever you want to start curating an exhibit for others? Can you walk through that process from when collected them to curation?

Linda
Absolutely. Once we’ve collected them, they are shipped frozen on a boat from McMurdo Station to California. From there, they are shipped all by themselves in their very own refrigerated tractor trailer to Houston, and NASA. At the Johnson Space Center, [they] process them in essentially the laboratory that used to process the Apollo lunar rocks. And it is now almost exclusively for Antarctic meteorites.

The meteorites are frozen, until they are put into what they call a dry nitrogen cabinet. It dries the meteorites and keeps any additional contaminants from getting into the meteorites. We are looking to try and preserve the meteorites for a long period of time to make them available for both science and exhibition- less so for exhibition. More so for science. We want to make sure that we preserve their pristine nature. NASA does all of sort of the initial sort of physical characterization, they weigh them, they take pictures of them, they record what happens to the meteorites. As they are processed, they remove a small chip. And then that small chip ultimately goes to the Smithsonian for classification. And then the meteorites get stored in their in their collections until essentially a scientist requests them. NASA creates a publication that it comes out twice a year, and then scientists can read that publication and look at the new meteorites that have been found and characterized for that year. And they can put in a request. And then twice a year, there is a committee that sits down and evaluates those requests. And then they tell NASA go ahead and send this amount of material to the scientist for additional study.

Laurel
What are some of the most important lessons, surprises or challenges that you’ve had over the years through expeditions that you’ve gone on?

Linda
I think the first and probably the most fundamental is that I learned the importance of teamwork in survival. Going to Antarctica is obviously a very special and unique opportunity. It is amazing to me that we have basically built a foundation or a framework in which people can go and do research and explore and learn new things, essentially in environment that is very, very difficult to live in.

One thing that always occurred to me, I actually really enjoyed the periods of time where the weather was so bad that we couldn’t actually go out and do the work. And yet, I would still go outside and just marvel at the fact that I was probably the first human to step foot in this particular place. I was the first human to survive in this place. I liked sort of that baseline feeling of existence, that nothing else mattered except that we had to depend on each other, that we were able to live in this place for a brief period of time and experience what we experienced and know that we’re actually contributing to, you know, a really important knowledge base and helping other scientists to advance their science and ultimately to learn a lot more about where we come from, how our solar system evolved, and help us to find places like Earth perhaps elsewhere in the universe.

[music]

Laurel
We hope you enjoyed hearing about science and research activities in Antarctica. Please visit Longitude.site for the episode transcript and find out other episodes in this series.

If you are in Houston this spring, please visit our accompanying exhibit at the Rice University library featuring photographs from Dr. Fries collection. Our exhibit will be available for display at other university libraries upon request.

If you are a college student interested in leading conversations for our next podcast series, please write to us at podcast@longitude.site.

Join us next time for more unique insights on Longitude Sound Bytes.