ULB-VUB expedition returns from Antarctica with a meteorite weighing almost 8 kilograms

Meteorites fall everywhere on Earth, but they are not easy to find everywhere. A meteorite that crashed years ago in a rainforest or another densely vegetated place, you will probably only find if you happen to stumble upon it and even on soils where there are many ‘terrestrial’ rocks, meteorites are not noticeable.

This is not the case in the deserts of North Africa and Australia, nor in Antarctica, where the black space rocks stand out against the snowy or icy plains. And even as the meteorites sink into the ice, the movement of the glaciers against the rocks helps bring the meteorites back to the surface of the continent’s blue ice zones.

These blue ice zones are old layers of ice that are pushed up by underlying mountain ranges and that owe their blue color to the enormous pressure with which the ice has been compressed for centuries. In fact, some blue ice zones are so-called meteorite accumulation zones, places where meteorites are brought together by the movement of the ice.

Deserts – and oddly enough, Antarctica is the driest continent on Earth and therefore a desert – have the added benefit of the arid climate limiting meteorite weathering. The cold in Antarctica also helps to preserve the meteorites.

And so expeditions to Antarctica have been organized since the 1970s to find meteorites. The Université libre de Bruxelles and the Vrije Universiteit Brussel had also collected more than 600 meteorites during three previous expeditions to the Nansen Blue Ice Field, in collaboration with the Japanese National Institute for Polar Research (NIPR).

The international team that took part in this campaign was led by Vinciane Debaille (ULB/Fonds de la Recherche Scientifique-FNRS) and consisted of VUB researcher Ryoga Maeda, Maria Schönbächler (ETH-Zurich) and Maria Valdes (Field Museum of Natural History /University of Chicago). Manu Poudelet (International Polar Guide Association) was the guide on site.