September 7, 2008
On the day you were born, the universe did what it has always done best: transformed chaos into beauty.
Searching for Meteorites in Antarctica
Birthday · September 7, 2008
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APOD published September 7, 2008. Credit: Ralph P. Harvey (CWRU), Antarctic Search for Meteorites Program, NASA, NSF. A publication-date match, not a photo taken on your date. Independent of NASA.
Where is the best place on Earth to find meteorites? Although meteors fall all over the world, they usually just sink to the bottom of an ocean, are buried by shifting terrain, or are easily confused with terrestrial rocks. At the bottom of the Earth, however, in East Antarctica, huge sheets of blue ice remain pure and barren. When traversing such a sheet, a dark rock will stick out. These rocks have a high probability of being true meteorites -- likely pieces of another world. An explosion or impact might have catapulted these meteorites from the Moon, Mars, or even an asteroid, yielding valuable information about these distant worlds and our early Solar System. Small teams of snowmobiling explorers so far have found thousands. Pictured above, ice-trekkers search a field 25-kilometers in front of Otway Massif in the Transantarctic Mountain Range during the Antarctic summer of 1995-1996.
Image credit: Ralph P. Harvey (CWRU), Antarctic Search for Meteorites Program, NASA, NSF