Tag Archives: Antarctica

Hefty meteorite containing materials billions of years old found by researchers in Antarctica

January 30, 2023 Admin Leave a comment

Scientists say they have discovered a nearly 20 pound meteorite in Antarctica that contains some of the oldest materials in our entire solar system.

ANTARCTICA – Researchers made an out-of-this-world discovery in Antarctica’s frozen landscape when they found a nearly 20-pound meteorite that contains some of the oldest materials in our solar system lying among the snow and ice.

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

(Chicago Field Museum)

According to the Chicago Field Museum, Antarctica’s landscape is ideal for meteorite hunting because the black space rocks stick out like a sore thumb against the snowy fields. Even when they sink into the ice, the glaciers’ churning motion against the rock below helps to re-expose the meteorites near the surface of the continent’s blue ice fields.

Recently, a team of researchers who just returned from Antarctica can confirm the continent’s meteorite-hunter friendliness as they returned with five new meteorites, including one that weighed 16.7 pounds.

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The 17-pound meteorite found in Antarctica.

(Chicago Field Museum)

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

Valdes estimated that of the roughly 45,000 meteorites retrieved from Antarctica over the past century, only about 100 or so are this size or larger.

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A researchers with one of the meteorites discovered in Antarctica.

(Maria Valdes/Chicago Field Museum)

Valdes was among four scientists on the meteorite-hunting mission led by Vinciane Debaille of the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB). The research team also included Maria Schönbächler of ETH-Zurich and Ryoga Maeda of the ULB.

They were the first to explore the potential new meteorite sites mapped using satellite images by Veronica Tollenaar, a thesis student in glaciology at the ULB.

Researchers with one of the meteorites discovered in Antarctica.

(Maria Valdes/Chicago Field Museum)

“Going on an adventure exploring unknown areas is exciting,” Debaille said. “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.”

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

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Out-of-this-world discovery in Antarctica

January 29, 2023 Admin Leave a comment

Scientists say they’ve found a space rock for the ages in Antarctica — an extremely rare meteorite that contains some of the oldest material in the solar system.

“When we saw this one just sitting by itself in the middle of the blue ice, we all got so excited,” Chicago Field Museum researcher Maria Valdes told the Chicago Tribune.

The 17-pound meteorite, described as about “the size of a gourd,” was discovered Jan. 5 by an international team at the end of an 11-day expedition.

The extraordinary rock, which contains material from billions of years ago, is one of the largest meteorites ever found on the continent and likely originated in the Main Asteroid Belt between Mars and Jupiter, The Independent reported.

“To put the meteorite’s size in perspective, of the 45,000 meteorites retrieved from Antarctica over the last century, only 100 are this size or larger,” said Chicago’s Field Museum, which was part of the expedition.

Researchers on snowmobiles spent the better part of two weeks combing ice fields in search of meteorites when they made the stunning find just as they were about to wrap up their exploration, according to The Tribune.

The researchers celebrate their out-of-this-world find.

Courtesy of Maria Valdes / SWNS

Valdes said they were hesitant about celebrating at first “because we knew that if we found a meteorite, this was really the mother lode. On the last day, the last hour.”

The team became convinced it had indeed found a rare space rock when members discovered it was “the size of a bowling ball but twice the weight of a bowling ball,” Valdes told the paper.

The rock had what Valdes described as a “fusion crust” — a glassy outer layer that slightly melted when it entered the atmosphere. It was also worn down, a sign it had been on Earth for many ages.

The meteorite was sent to The Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences in Belgium for chemical analysis.

“All meteorites have something to say about the evolution of Earth,” Valdes said. “Size doesn’t necessarily matter when it comes to meteorites, and even tiny micrometeorites can be incredibly scientifically valuable.”

Scientists from the US, Belgium and Switzerland spent 11 days combing the icy continent looking for space rocks.

Most of the 45,000 meteorites found in Antarctica over the past century have only weighed a few grams, The Independent noted.

The find came months after NASA successfully destroyed a 530-foot-wide asteroid in a test run to prepare for the possibility of a massive space rock hurling toward and threating Earth, such as the 6.2 mile-wide asteroid that scientists believe wiped out the dinosaurs millions of years ago.

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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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Iceberg roughly the size of London breaks off in Antarctica

January 26, 2023 Admin Leave a comment

CNN
—

An iceberg nearly the size of Greater London broke off the Brunt Ice Shelf in Antarctica on Sunday according to the British Antarctic Survey.

Scientists first discovered significant cracks in the ice shelf a decade ago, but in the last two years there have been two major breaks. The BAS Halley Research Station is located on the Brunt Ice Shelf and glaciologists say the research station is safe.

The iceberg is around 600 square miles, or 1550 square kilometers. The researchers say this event was expected and not a result of climate change.

“This calving event has been expected and is part of the natural behavior of the Brunt Ice Shelf. It is not linked to climate change. Our science and operational teams continue to monitor the ice shelf in real-time to ensure it is safe, and to maintain the delivery of the science we undertake at Halley,” Professor Dominic Hodgson a BAS glaciologist said in a news release.

The calving comes amid record-low sea ice extent in Antarctica, where it is summer.

“While the decline in Antarctic sea ice extent is always steep at this time of year, it has been unusually rapid this year,” scientists at the National Snow and Ice Data Center reported in early January, “and at the end of December, Antarctic sea ice extent stood at the lowest in the 45-year satellite record.”

Researchers at the data center say the low sea ice has been due in part to a large band of warmer-than-normal air temperatures, which climbed to 2 degrees Celsius above average over the Ross Sea in November and December. Strong winds have also hastened the sea ice decline, they reported.

Recent data shows the sea ice has not since recovered, suggesting the continent could end the summer with a new record on the books for the second year in a row.

Antarctica has experienced a roller-coaster of sea ice extent over the past couple of decades, swinging wildly from record highs to record lows. Unlike the Arctic, where scientists say climate change is accelerating its impacts, Antarctica’s sea ice extent is highly variable.

“There’s a link between what’s going on in Antarctica and the general warming trend around the rest of the world, but it’s different from what we see in mountain glaciers and what we see in the Arctic,” Ted Scambos, a glaciologist at the University of Colorado Boulder and lead scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center, previously told CNN.

Satellite data that stretches back to 1978 shows that the region was still producing record-high sea ice extent as recently as 2014 and 2015. Then it suddenly plunged in 2016 and has stayed lower than average since.

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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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Science

17-pound meteorite in Antarctica discovered by scientists

January 24, 2023 Admin Leave a comment

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CNN
—

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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Science

Meteorite Made of Earth’s Oldest Material Found in Antarctica

January 21, 2023 Admin Leave a comment

The cold continent of Antarctica holds relics of our planet’s past — from clues of major climate events to zombie viruses buried beneath its frozen exterior. Apart from being a repository of invaluable information about Earth, however, it also houses foreign visitors from the universe, including meteorites!

The home of the south pole is a perfect place for meteorite hunting, thanks to all the ice and snow! The white backdrop makes the dark-coloured meteorites easier to spot, and the dry, desert-ish climate keeps the weathering in check. And if those space rocks sink beneath the ice, they eventually get coughed out by glacial churning.

In spite of these positives, finding sizable chunks of space rocks in Antarctica is incredibly rare. Nevertheless, a study team that left for an Antarctic meteorite hunt in December 2022 has managed to return with some interesting finds.

During the month-long mission on meteorite exploration around the Belgian Princess Elisabeth Antarctica (PEA) Station, the team of scientists uncovered five new meteorites, one of which is a monster space rock weighing a whopping 7.6 kgs!

“At the moment, it looks like an ordinary chondrite. This type of meteorite came from the asteroid belt and ended its travel in the Antarctic blue ice, waiting several tens of thousands of years in the ice before discovery,” explains Professor Maria Schoenbaechler from the department of earth sciences at ETH-Zurich in Switzerland and a study team member.

Antarctica’s Blue Ice Field is an area with winds so strong, they can literally blow away layers of snow atop glaciers.

Around 45,000 meteorites have been retrieved from Antarctica over the past century, and this new find is easily among the top 100 meteorites (in terms of size) recovered from the continent, as per the Chicago Field Museum.

So, what does this exceptional find mean for research in Earth sciences?

According to Professor Maria Schoenbaechler, the meteorite belongs to the oldest material that can be found on Earth, which makes it similar to a building block of our planet. Therefore, it could play a vital role in helping humanity study the formation of its own world.

But this is not all. Before venturing out into Antarctica’s tricky terrain, the research team mapped the area using satellite imagery — covering aspects such as ice flow, temperature, and surface slope measurements — to pinpoint sites with a higher possibility of new meteorites with the help of artificial intelligence.

And this satellite map, thought to be around 80% accurate in giving directions, suggests more than 300,000 meteorites are still out there in Antarctica, just waiting to be found!

These predictions may well renew humanity’s aspirations of making more such discoveries, which could help us trace our solar system’s history and ultimately expand our understanding of the universe.

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Science

Monster Space Rock in Antarctica Is Among The Largest Found in 100 Years : ScienceAlert

January 20, 2023 Admin Leave a comment

Antarctica has a lot going for it when it comes to meteorite hunting. The dark rocks stand out against the icy landscape. Its dry climate keeps weathering to a minimum. And even when meteorites sink into the ice they are often returned to the surface by the churning of the glaciers.

In spite of these ideal conditions, finding sizeable chunks of space rock is rare.

A group of researchers have just returned from the ice-covered continent with five new meteorites that include an unusually large specimen.

The big find in this haul weighs in at 7.6 kilograms (16.8 pounds), placing it in the top 100 in terms of size for meteorites recovered in Antarctica over the past century. Considering some 45,000 have been recovered in that time, that’s saying something.

This monster of a space rock is now being taken back to the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences, where it will be studied closely along with the smaller rocks. Scientists can learn a lot from the journeys that meteorites have had to our planet.

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

While meteorites might be easier to spot in Antarctica, the continent isn’t exactly easy to travel across, with its freezing cold conditions and remote location. The team involved in this find spent several days camping out in the wilderness, moving by foot and snowmobile.

It also helps to know where meteorites are likely to be found. Here the researchers used a ‘treasure map’ that was published last year, which uses clues found in satellite imagery – such as ice flow, temperature, and surface slope measurements – to make educated guesses with the help of AI as to where new rocks might be found.

The researchers at work on an ice field. (Maria Valdes)

“Going on an adventure exploring unknown areas is exciting,” says geoscientist Vinciane Debaille, from the Université Libre de Bruxelles in Belgium.

“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.”

The map used by the researchers is thought to be around 80 percent accurate in terms of the directions it gives, and its makers have calculated that more than 300,000 meteorites are out there in Antarctica, waiting to be found.

Despite the favorable conditions in Antarctica for meteorite discovery, scientists think we’re still missing out on finding a lot of them, particularly those high in iron. Part of the reason might be these types of meteorite heat up in the sunlight, melting the surrounding ice and sinking out of sight below the surface.

However, there’s now an exciting new haul of these rocks ready and waiting to be looked at more closely – and somewhere in the newly recovered meteorites should be traces of the history of the Solar System that we exist in.

“The bigger a sample size we have of meteorites, the better we can understand our Solar System, and the better we can understand ourselves,” says Valdes.

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Science

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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