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Scientists discover monster 17-pound meteorite in Antarctica

January 29, 2023 Admin Leave a comment

A team of researchers working in Antarctica have discovered a massive meteorite, weighing in at a hefty 17 pounds. Rocks falling to Earth from space aren’t uncommon, but it’s very unusual for such a large one to be found. Studying such meteorites can help scientists learn about early conditions in the solar system and even about how planets form.

The researchers found a total of five meteorites, including the gigantic 17-pounder. Antarctica is an inhospitable place for humans but a great location for meteorite hunting, thanks to its combination of dry climate and snowy conditions, which make it easier to spot dark hunks of rocks.

The researchers with their 16.7-pound find. White helmet: Maria Schönbächler. Green helmet: Maria Valdes. Black helmet: Ryoga Maeda. Orange helmet: Vinciane Debaille. Courtesy of Maria Valdes

As the coldest place on Earth, though, Antarctica is a difficult place to work — even if it is stunning to look at. “Going on an adventure exploring unknown areas is exciting,” said lead researcher Vinciane Debaille of the Université Libre de Bruxelles in Brussels. “But we also had to deal with the fact that the reality on the ground is much more difficult than the beauty of satellite images.”

Four team members had scoured the white continent for meteorites, using satellite imagery that had been used for mapping to locate the monster find. “Size doesn’t necessarily matter when it comes to meteorites, and even tiny micrometeorites can be incredibly scientifically valuable,” said Maria Valdes of the University of Chicago, one of the researchers, in a statement. “But of course, finding a big meteorite like this one is rare, and really exciting.”

Researchers estimate that of the approximately 45,000 meteorites found in Antarctica to date, only around 100 are this big or larger. Along with the four other meteorites discovered by the team, it will now be shipped to the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences for study.

Meteorites are scientifically valuable because they originate from beyond Earth, bringing a piece of the solar system to us for study. They can come from asteroids, comets, or even be pieces of other planets that have been blasted off by an impact. They can also reveal information about the early stages of the solar system because they can be extremely old and well-preserved due to their time in space.

“Studying meteorites helps us better understand our place in the universe,” said Valdes. “The bigger a sample size we have of meteorites, the better we can understand our Solar System, and the better we can understand ourselves.”

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Meteorite Hunters Discover Extraordinary 17-Pound Space Rock in Antarctica

January 25, 2023 Admin Leave a comment

The researchers with their 16.7-pound find. White helmet: Maria Schönbächler. Green helmet: Maria Valdes. Black helmet: Ryoga Maeda. Orange helmet: Vinciane Debaille. Credit: Photo courtesy of Maria Valdes

Antarctica is a tough place to work, for obvious reasons— it’s bitterly cold, remote, and wild. However, it’s one of the best places in the world to hunt for meteorites. That’s partly because Antarctica is a desert, and its dry climate limits the degree of weathering the meteorites experience. On top of the dry conditions, the landscape is ideal for meteorite hunting: the black space rocks stand out clearly against snowy fields. Even when meteorites sink into the ice, the glaciers’ churning motion against the rock below helps re-expose the meteorites near the surface of the continent’s blue ice fields.

An international team of researchers who just got back from Antarctica can attest to the continent’s meteorite-hunter-friendliness: they returned with five new meteorites, including one that weighs 16.7 pounds (7.6 kg).

The 17-pound meteorite. Credit: Courtesy of Maria Valdes

Maria Valdes, a research scientist at the Field Museum and the

The team’s tents when in the field. Credit: Courtesy of Maria Valdes

Valdes was one of four scientists on the mission, led by Vinciane Debaille of the Université Libre de Bruxelles (FNRS-ULB); the research team was rounded out by Maria Schönbächler (ETH-Zurich) and Ryoga Maeda (VUB-ULB). The researchers were the first to explore potential new meteorite sites mapped using satellite imagery by Veronica Tollenaar, a thesis student in glaciology at the ULB.

Rocks strewn across an ice field, with the scientists searching for meteorites in the background. Credit: Courtesy of Maria Valdes

“Going on an adventure exploring unknown areas is exciting,” says Debaille, “but we also had to deal with the fact that the reality on the ground is much more difficult than the beauty of satellite images.” Despite timing their trip for Antarctica’s summertime in late December, temperatures hovered around 14° F (-10° C). Valdes notes that some days during their trip, it was actually colder in Chicago than it was in Antarctica, but spending days riding snowmobiles and trekking through ice fields and then sleeping in a tent made the Antarctic weather feel more extreme.

The team hiking past rock formations in Antarctica. Credit: Courtesy of Maria Valdes

The five meteorites recovered by the team will be analyzed at the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences; meanwhile, sediment potentially containing tiny micrometeorites was divided among the researchers for study at their institutions.

Valdes says she’s eager to see what the analyses of the meteorites reveal, because “studying meteorites helps us better understand our place in the universe. The bigger a sample size we have of meteorites, the better we can understand our Solar System, and the better we can understand ourselves.”

A snowy field in Antarctica. Credit: Courtesy of Maria Valdes

The team was guided by Manu Poudelet of the International Polar Guide Association and assisted by Alain Hubert. They were supported in part by the Belgian Science Policy. Valdes’s work is supported by the Field Museum’s Robert A. Pritzker Center for Meteoritics and Polar Studies, the TAWANI Foundation, and the Meeker family.

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17-pound meteorite in Antarctica discovered by scientists

January 24, 2023 Admin Leave a comment

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During a recent excursion to the icy plains of Antarctica, an international team of researchers discovered five new meteorites — including one of the largest ever found on the continent.

The rare meteorite is about the size of a cantaloupe but weighs a hefty 17 pounds (7.7 kilograms). The specimen is one of only about 100 that size or larger discovered in Antarctica, a prime meteroite-hunting location where more than 45,000 space rocks have been tracked down.

Now, the exceptional find is heading to the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences in Brussels, where it will be studied. And Maria Valdes, a research scientist at Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History and the University of Chicago who was part of the expedition team, has kept some of the material for her own analysis.

Valdes’ area of focus is cosmochemistry. That “broadly means that we use meteorites to study the origin and evolution of the solar system through chemical methods,” she told CNN. She’ll take her samples and use strong acids to dissolve them before using a process called calibrated chemistry to isolate various elements that make up the rock.

“Then I can start to think about the origin of this rock, how it evolved over time, what kind of parent body it came from, and where in the solar system that parent body formed,” Valdes said. “Those are kind of the big questions that we try to address.”

Meteorites strike Earth evenly across its surface, so Antarctica is not home to a disproportionately large concentration of them, Valdes noted. But the pure white ice is an ideal backdrop for spotting the jet black rocks.

Hunting for meteroids is “really low tech and less complicated than people might think,” Valdes said. “We’re either walking around or driving on a snowmobile, looking on the surface.”

But the team did have an idea of where to look. A January 2022 study used satellite data to help narrow down locations where meteorites were most likely to be found.

“Meteorites themselves are too small to detect from space with satellites,” Valdes explained. “But this study used satellite measurements of surface temperature, surface slope, surface velocity, ice thickness — things like this. And it plugged (the data) into a machine learning algorithm to tell us where the highest probabilities of finding meteorite accumulation zones are.”

Distinguishing a meteorite from other rocks can be a tricky process, Valdes said. Researchers look for fusion crust, a glassy coating that forms as the cosmic object plummets through the Earth’s atmosphere.

“A lot of rocks can seem like they’re meteorites, but they’re not,” she said. “We call these meteor-wrongs.”

Another distinguishing characteristic is the potential specimen’s weight. A meteorite will be much heavier for its size than a typical Earth rock because it’s packed with dense metals.

The conditions the researchers endured were grueling. Though Valdes and three other scientists carried out their mission during the continent’s “summer,” which offered 24 hours of daylight, temperatures still hovered around 14 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 10 degrees Celsius), according to a news release from the Field Museum.

The research team spent about a week and a half with a polar field guide, living in tents pitched on the icy terrain. However, Valdes said she and her colleagues also spent time at a Belgian research station near Antarctica’s coast, where they enjoyed warm, cheesy foods, such as fondue.

When it comes to future research, the good news, Valdes added, is that the five meteorites she and her colleagues discovered on this expedition are just the tip of the iceberg.

“I’m eager to go back there, for sure,” she said. “Based on the satellite study, there are 300,000 meteorites, at least, waiting to still be collected in Antarctica. And the larger the (number of) samples that we have, the better we can understand our solar system.”

The excursion was led by Vinciane Debaille, a professor at the Université Libre de Bruxelles in Brussels. She and Valdes were joined by Maria Schönbächler, a professor at Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zurich, and doctoral student Ryoga Maeda of Vrije Universiteit Brussel and the Université Libre de Bruxelles.

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Scientists find 17-pound meteorite in icy Antarctica

January 21, 2023 Admin Leave a comment

A daring team of scientists has endured the inhospitable conditions of the icy desert of Antarctica to recover five new meteorites, including a near-17-pound monster space rock.

The team of scientists included Field Museum and the University of Chicago researcher Maria Valdes, who estimated that of the 45,000 meteorites recovered to date from the icy wasteland of Antarctica, only 100 or so have been as large as the largest member of this new haul, which weighs 16.7 pounds (7.6 kilograms).

“Size doesn’t necessarily matter when it comes to meteorites, and even tiny micrometeorites can be incredibly scientifically valuable, but of course, finding a big meteorite like this one is rare and really exciting,” Valdes said in a statement.

Related: How many meteorites hit Earth every year?

The team, which was led by Vinciane Debaille, a planetary scientist at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (FNRS-ULB) in Belgium, was the first to explore new potential meteor sites that had been mapped using satellite imagery.

“Going on an adventure exploring unknown areas is exciting, but we also had to deal with the fact that the reality on the ground is much more difficult than the beauty of satellite images,” Debaille said in the statement.

The team planned their excursion for Antarctica’s summer, in late December, but temperatures in the region still hovered at around 14 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 10 degrees degrees Celsius). Valdes said that at some points during the mission, Antarctica was actually warmer than Chicago, but the weather felt more extreme to the team because of days spent riding snowmobiles and trekking through ice fields and nights spent sleeping in tents.

With such frigid conditions even in the midst of summer, Antarctica may seem like an unlikely place for anyone to choose to visit, yet for meteorite hunters like this team, this frigid vista offers unique opportunities. That’s because Antarctica is one of the best spots across the globe to hunt for meteorites.

The snowy landscape of Antarctica where five meteorites, including a rare 17-pound monster, were recovered. (Image credit: Courtesy of Maria Valdes)

Antarctica is a desert with a dry climate, which reduces the amount of weathering experienced by meteorites. Also, across the white snowy landscape, the black hue of these space rocks stands out when they are at the surface of the region.

Conditions in Antarctica are even favorable for the discovery of meteorites that may have sunk beneath the snow and ice. This is because the churning motion of glaciers moving against rock can re-expose meteorites near the surface.

Though there is no denying the largest meteorite recovered by the team is a whopper, it’s far from the largest or most massive example of such a space rock to reach Earth’s surface. That record is held by the Hoba meteorite in Namibia. Hoba is 9 feet (2.7 meters) long, 9 feet wide and 3 feet (0.9 meters) thick and weighs around 66 tons, or 132,000 pounds (60,000 kg). That’s almost 7,765 times heavier than the newly discovered Antarctic meteorite.

The whopping new space rock and the other meteorites recovered by the researchers will now be analyzed at the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences, while the team members will individually divide and study samples of sediments they collected from Antarctica.

Valdes is excited to learn what secrets the meteorites hold. “Studying meteorites helps us better understand our place in the universe,” she said. “The bigger a sample size we have of meteorites, the better we can understand our solar system, and the better we can understand ourselves.”

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Meteorite Hunters Find 17-Pound Space Rock in Antarctica

January 18, 2023 Admin Leave a comment

The 16.7 pound (7.6 kilogram) meteorite was found sitting on the surface of the Antarctic desert, where its black composition contrasted against the snow.

Image: Maria Valdes

Researchers combing the surface of Antarctica for space rocks hit the jackpot by finding five meteorites in the tundra, one of which weighs almost 17 pounds.

The expedition team found the meteorites sitting on top of the snow in Antarctica, where the rocks’ black bodies stuck out against the white snow fields of the continent. Antarctica is an ideal place to find relatively undisturbed space rocks, since its dry climate prevents excess weathering over time. Maria Valdes, a research scientist with the Field Museum and the University of Chicago, and her team found a total of five meteorites during their hunt in December, one of which weighs 16.7 pounds (7.6 kilograms).

“Size doesn’t necessarily matter when it comes to meteorites, and even tiny micrometeorites can be incredibly scientifically valuable,” said Valdes in a statement. “But of course, finding a big meteorite like this one is rare, and really exciting.”

Researchers Maria Schönbächler, Maria Valdes, Ryoga Maeda, and Vinciane Debaille pose with the largest of the meteorites.

Image: Maria Valdes

Valdes estimates that, out of the tens of thousands of meteorites that have been found in Antarctica, only around 100 are as large as the one her team found. To find the meteorites, the researchers rode on snow mobiles and walked in areas that were previously mapped and identified through satellite imagery as potential landing spots for meteorites. When the team found a suspected meteorite, they used a handheld tool to test the magnetic properties of the rock, Valdes explained in an email to Gizmodo. While most of these meteorites stay on the surface, even those that sink into the ice will reemerge as glaciers shift and move.

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“Going on an adventure exploring unknown areas is exciting,” said Vinciane Debaille, a member of the research team from Université Libre de Bruxelles, in a statement. “But we also had to deal with the fact that the reality on the ground is much more difficult than the beauty of satellite images.”

While the find is exciting, the next step for the scientists is to determine what the meteorites can tell us about the universe. The five rocks Valdes and her team found with be analyzed at the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences, while soil samples from the area will be analyzed by the team themselves.

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Health

Woman who couldn’t shed belly bulge discovers she has 17-pound tumor

October 15, 2021 Admin Leave a comment

Her fat gain was as serious as cancer.

A Texas woman who couldn’t shed belly fat no matter how hard she tried was flabbergasted after learning that she actually harbored a 17-pound stomach tumor.

“I was in so much shock,” Amanda Shoultz told WFAA about her alarming affliction. “It was very eye-opening.”

The flabby fiasco began in January when the 29-year-old Dallas native started gaining fat around the midsection.

Shoultz initially chalked up the waist gain to getting older, but grew concerned after her stomach started to look like it “was bloated all the time.”

Despite adopting a strict exercise routine and eating habits — which included giving up lactose and gluten — the aghast gal saw little improvement.

“I started working out more. I was dieting more and, oddly enough, I was losing weight but I was gaining inches in my stomach,” Shoultz told “Good Morning America.”

Alarmed at her slim-possible predicament, the poor woman reported to the doctor in August for a checkup. They ran several blood tests, which didn’t show anything out of the ordinary.

Shoultz hopes her case can convince others to follow their gut when it comes to health.

Amanda Shoultz Facebook

However, Shoultz was not convinced, so she went to the gastroenterologist, where a CT scan revealed a 12-inch-wide tumor growing around her right kidney and adrenal gland. The patient was officially diagnosed with Liposarcoma, a rare cancer strain that forms in a person’s fat tissue. The diagnosis was difficult to detect as she presented no other cancer symptoms aside from her “rock” solid belly bulge.

“My mom said you could have punched me in my stomach and broken your hand it was so hard,” lamented Shoultz.

Hoping to remove the carcinogenic growth before it affected the woman’s vital organs, doctors scheduled her for surgery six days after her diagnosis, WFAA reported.

Amanda Shoultz went from weighing 125 pounds pre-op to 108 pounds following surgery.

During the two-hour procedure, doctors made a foot-long incision down Shoultz’s stomach and extracted both the tumor along with the affected organs.

That’s when they discovered that it weighed 17 pounds — as much as a seventh-month-old baby.

“When I woke up, and they told me it weighed that much, I remember being like I think I misheard you because of the medication I’m on,” recalled Shoultz, who went from weighing 125 pounds pre-op to 108 pounds following surgery.

Fortunately, she didn’t have to undergo any other treatment as the cancer hadn’t metastasized to other parts of her body.

In fact, her biggest problem now is regaining the weight that she lost from her misinformed diet and exercise regimen.

“Once I left the hospital, my stomach was back to normal,” explained Shoultz. “Now I’m just eating all the food that I missed when I gave it up for a year in order to put some weight back on.”

Shoultz hopes that her case can help convince others to literally follow their gut when it comes to health.

“We preach it at the hospital, don’t die of doubt,” she said. “No one else is going to need to fight for you, so fight for yourself and find a care team that is going to care for you through the journey.”

In the complete converse of Shoutz’s case last January, a UK teen who was praised for her rapid weight loss discovered that she had an 11.8in tumor on her ovary.

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Scientists discover monster 17-pound meteorite in Antarctica

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