DancesWithWhales

Question: Also by having Love as your last name did it ever help with the ladies?

Stan: Not until I got my doctorate.

Stan: Nope, no peesicles. It's still liquid all the way down. In fact, if you pee on an upslope, it will still come back at you.

The main purpose to finding meteorites to help us understand the origins of the solar system, the origin of our planet, and the origin of life on earth. They contain the building blocks of materials of the solar system.

Geologists study rocks to study the history of the earth. Meteorites are the rock record for the solar system. They record the history all the way from the hot gasses condensing to form the planets.

This can help answer fundamental questions about where we came from.

Some may even contain tiny grains of stardust that can predate our solar system that can tell us things about before our solar system formed.

These are some of the oldest materials we can study, older than any materials on earth.

Antarctica also has a history similar to other continents. We have seen some nice fossils. At one place we found lots of geodes - rocks full of crystals.

1. Besides cold, what is it like on the bottom of the Earth?

Windy, isolated, sunny all the time. Beautiful and majestic. At the winter solstice, the sun goes around in a circle. Midnight is the same as noon, but the sun is at the opposite side. At noon, the sun is to the north, and at midnight it is due south. And it's pretty much the same level all the time.

Shaun: At the south pole, there are 15 ceremonial flags around a pole. Nearby there is a pole where they have plotted the exact position of the south pole at Jan 1st. Every year it moves a few meters, so you see a line of poles where it used to be.

Off to one side, there used to be a dome, which is now gone. There is a new pole station there now, 400-500 feet long, 2 stories. There are over 200 people working there on many experiments, which you see scattered around the station. One experiment has drilled over 2km deep into the ice.

Tom:

The ice we're searching is called "blue ice". It's very old, it's been flowing as a glacier for tens of thousands of years. It's blue because it absorbs the longer wavelengths of light. It's not at all flat, it has small waves and ripples from centimetres to meters in size. Up to swells dozens of meters high. It's like a frozen ocean. The wind is always blowing, it's like being in a fog machine with ghosts of snow blowing across us. We're driving around on snowmobiles in this fabulous blue world.