After a safe arrival in Antarctica, Matthias, Steven and field guide Raphael started searching for micrometeorites today. Our first goal was a glacial moraine next to the Vengen mountain, Sør Rondane, which is approximately 1 hour away from the Princess Elisabeth station using skidoos. We decided to sample glacial moraine because thousands of micrometeorites were previously successfully extracted from moraines located next to the Larkman Nunatak, Transantarctic Mountains. The nice weather allowed us to take our time to identify suitable sampling sites on the downwind side of this very large moraine. After spending about 3 hours sampling 5 sites, we made our way back towards the Princess Elisabeth station, where we quickly started looking for micrometeorites in our moraine samples. It didn’t take us long to find three cosmic spherules (i.e. melted micrometeorites) in two different samples! This first day of micrometeorite hunting is thus a success and motivates us to look at more glacial moraines and deposits near mountain summits in the area.
