— Geoff Evatt | 31 Dec 2019
Hello from Outer Recovery as we approach the end of the decade. Low cloud and poor contrast abounds today, so we’re confined to the camp, giving us the chance to tinker with the system and get some rest (the ambiance outside is currently Nordic, and not unwelcome). The last few days has seen clear positive progress. As in, we seem to have salvaged a working core of the detector system. And we have been out doing systematic searches with it, covering a reasonable area, all things considered. Issues seem to pop up every 3 hours or so, but in those hours the system is working amazingly well. In fact, after some re-engineering of a sledge yesterday, we finally have two operating systems (one as 5 panels although only three of these are working, and the other is now a single panel system), meaning we can search a width of 4 metres as we travel along. Let’s hope those 3 hours of search time start creeping upwards…. this whole project is a numbers game: the larger area of the ice field we can search, the more likely we are of finding a lost iron meteorite.
Other than that, our surface meteorite count for this season is now 42, which is great, especially given the relatively small area we are searching (this blue ice field is just under 12 km2, but maybe a fifth is hidden by sastrugi, making it impossible to search). After strong winds the other day, some of the snow cover altered, and Katie and I found a nice chondritic meteorite where a sastrugi existed the day before.
Food-wise we seem to be doing OK. It appears the vast number of calories we had at Rothera cause our metabolisms to increase, meaning that when we first hit the field with far less food, we rapidly got thin. But now our bodies seem to have taken the hint, and the weight loss seems to have slowed. Or maybe we’re just eating more biscuits brown and porridge. Does this mean we’ll balloon as soon as we hit civilisation again? Either way I’m desperate for a run or cycle, but conscious that the general wear and tear on the body may mean it’ll take a while to be back to normal. Yet I can now drag metal detector panels for Britain. Maybe we now have the world record for doing so down here?!
UK Polar Meteorite Exploration and Research 