Geology Reference
In-Depth Information
Figure 1.7 we have the midnight Sun in full glory shining
on the driven snow.
As noted above, Annexstad, Nishio, and Funaki, who
had already left for home, collected 103 meteorites while
setting up their geodetic network across the Allan Hills
Main Icefield. At the head of the Darwin Glacier,
including Derrick Peak, our party of four, Cassidy,
Shiraishi, Clauter, and Marvin collected 8 irons from a
single shower and 32 stones. At the Allan Hills camp, we
collected 67 stones, making our total for the season of
204 stones and 8 fragments of a single iron.
Several changes to the procedure lay directly ahead:
1978-1979 was the final season in which Japanese mem-
bers would take part in the fieldwork and share meteor-
ites with ANSMET. The NSF soon would abandon the
use of military cargo planes and negotiate government
discounts to send its scientists to New Zealand via sched-
uled airlines. Cassidy remarked that the main advantage
to this change was that passengers would arrive in
Christchurch with smiles on their faces. In 1980-1981,
Cassidy added to the team Ludolf Schultz of the Max-
Planck-Institut für Chemie at Mainz, the first of
numerous team members from Europe. He also acquired
a highly skilled crevasse expert, John Schutt, who quickly
became adept at recognizing meteorites and sometimes
authored or coauthored seasonal reports for the Catalog s.
Schutt remained with ANSMET for more than three
decades, and his services were recognized in 2008 by the
awarding of a well-deserved honorary Doctor of Science
degree by Case Western Reserve University.
But the most exciting and significant event in the early
history of ANSMET would occur on 18 January 1982,
when John Schutt guided a visiting glaciologist, Ian
Whillans, to the Middle Western Icefield and they found
a lunar meteorite! Inasmuch as we have seen that Cassidy
had included the possibility of finding lunar meteorites in
his original proposal of 1974, we will extend this early
history long enough to include that event.
1.10. CATALOGING THE HISTORY
OF ANSMET
As was agreed at the November 11th meeting at the
NSF, the Smithsonian members would report on each
season's fieldwork and its harvest of meteorites. Brian
Mason volunteered to write these reports, and then he
persuaded me to join him. We styled them to be published
in the well-established series Smithsonian Contributions to
the Earth Sciences. However, from the first, we departed
from the format of a standard catalog by including
descriptive articles on field occurrences, collection and
curation procedures, measurements of ice motion, terres-
trial ages, and overviews of selected meteorite species. We
dropped the name catalog altogether from issue Number
26 that described the 1981-1982 season.
In summary, Brian and I published the following issues
of the Contributions: Number 23, on season 1977-1978;
Number 24, on seasons 1978-1979 and 1979-1980; and
Number 26, on seasons 1980-1981 and 1981-1982. Then
Brian retired from this effort and was succeeded by Glenn
MacPherson of the Smithsonian Natural History Museum,
who contributed to Number 28, which reported on seasons
1982-1983 and 1983-1984. By then, we both found this to
be an overwhelming assignment on top of our other respon-
sibilities. We also realized that the Antarctic Meteorite
Newsletter , which was issued and distributed by the curato-
rial staff at the Johnson Space Center, was fulfilling the
needs of scientists in a much more timely fashion than we
ever could. Thus ended the ANSMET series of Smithsonian
Contributions to the Earth Sciences.
1.12. ANSMET SEASON IV: 1979-1980
In that season, Bill Cassidy; John Annexstad; Lou
Rancitelli of Batelle Memorial Institute at Columbus,
Ohio; and Lee Benda, a crevasse expert from the
University of Washington, conducted an expedition
northward from the Allan Hills to Reckling Peak to check
out a stretch of bare ice 100 km long by 3-5 km wide that
extends westward from Reckling Peak. A year earlier,
Philip Kyle of Ohio State University had visited this area
and found five meteorites near Reckling Peak. The Allan
Hills lie at the limit of helicopter range from McMurdo,
so Cassidy's party had to make this trip by towing Nansen
sledges, packed with camping equipment, behind their
snowmobiles. They left the Allan Hills on 5 January and
drove 24 km northward, carefully skirting crevasses
before setting up Windy Camp, where they spent two
days due to high winds and low visibility. On 8 June they
broke camp and drove 32 km farther north and up a
rather steep slope to the vicinity of Reckling Peak. There,
crevasses became so large and numerous that the party
stopped and erected Crevasse Camp for rest and relaxa-
tion. The next day they turned westward and carefully
made their way downslope until they reached bare ice.
There, they used snowmobiles in tandem to lower each
Nansen sledge: one snowmobile in front, pulling and
1.11. ANSMET: WELL ESTABLISHED BY 1980
By the end of its third season, ANSMET had become
highly successful at carrying out this new mode of
scientific inquiry. It would continue to do so for going on
four decades, adding to the list of meteorite concentra-
tions in Antarctica and, needless to say, adding thou-
sands of meteorites, some of which were new to the
science but would now become available to the interna-
tional community.
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