Braving the unfavorable conditions of Antarctica’s icy desert, a brave team of scientists has found five new meteorites, including a monstrous 17-pound space rock. The team of scientists included Field Museum and University of Chicago researcher Maria Valdez, who estimated 45,000 individuals. meteoritesOf those found to date from the icy wasteland of Antarctica, only about 100 have been as large as the largest member of this new replica. It weighs 16.7 pounds (7.6 kilograms).

“Size doesn’t necessarily matter when it comes to meteorites, and even small micrometeorites can be incredibly valuable scientifically, but of course finding a large meteorite like this is rare and truly exciting,” Valdes said. Said. Declaration.

The team led by Vincian Debail, a planetary scientist at the Free University of Brussels (FNRS-ULB) in Belgium, was the first to investigate new potential meteor sites mapped using satellite imagery.

“It’s exciting to embark on an adventure exploring unknown regions, but we also had to face the fact that reality on the ground is far more complex than the beauty of satellite imagery,” Debail said in a statement.

The team had planned their summer trip to Antarctica for the end of December, but temperatures in the region were still hovering around 14 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 10 degrees Celsius). Valdez said that at some points during the mission, Antarctica was actually warmer than Chicago, but the weather was more extreme for the crew due to days spent snowmobiling and hiking through ice fields and nights spent in tents.

In such cold conditions, even during the hottest part of summer, Antarctica may not seem like an unlikely place for everyone, but for meteorite hunters like this team, this cold prospect offers unique opportunities. This is because Antarctica is one of the best places in the world to hunt meteorites. Snowy landscape of Antarctica with five meteorites, including a rare 17-pound monster. (Image: Courtesy of Maria Valdes)

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

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

While no one disputes that the largest meteorite the team found is huge, it’s far from the largest or largest example of such a space rock to reach Earth’s surface. This recording is from the Khoba meteorite in Namibia. The Hoba is 9 feet (2.7 meters) long, 9 feet wide and 3 feet (0.9 meters) thick and weighs approximately 66 tons or 132,000 pounds (60,000 kg). This is almost 7,765 times heavier than the recently discovered Antarctic meteorite.

The huge new space rock and other meteorites found by the researchers will now be analyzed at the Royal Institute of Natural Sciences in Belgium, as team members individually separate and examine sediment samples they collected in Antarctica.

Valdez is delighted to learn of the secrets that meteorites are hiding. “Studying meteorites helps us better understand our place in the universe,” he said. “The larger the sample size of meteorites we have, the better we can understand our solar system and the better we can understand ourselves.”