Antarctica should be the perfect spot to find alienated meteorites - the dark rocks are easy to spot on the icy-covered landscape, and upward-flowing ice regularly dumps hidden meteorites onto the surface.
But, oddly enough, relatively few iron-based meteorites have ever been found on the landmass, leading scientists are dubious that something is causing them to get lost underneath the ice. Now, a voyage has been approved to go and explore meteor stones for them.
Geologists Are Intrigued With Antarctica's Meteor Deposits
If the team, funded by the British Antarctic Survey, can find some of these iron-based meteor rocks, it could give us critical clues about how life started on our planet, and how the rest of the planet in our Solar System was formed.
"We now have the chance to commence on a truly thrilling scientific adventure," said expedition leader Geoffrey Evatt, a mathematician from the University of Manchester. "If successful, our mission will help scientists to decipher the birth-root of the Solar System."
Iron meteorites are so motivating to researchers because they're shaped from the cores of planetesimals - small planets in the early days of the Solar System that went on to be smashed by planetary impacts. Getting a better comprehension of their structure and age, scientists can tell a lot about how planets are formed, and how the Solar System have grown.
Two-thirds of the world's meteorites have been found in the Artic, many of them in areas of glacial ice known as meteorite stranding zones, which force meteorites to the surface with regular uprisings of ice.
But back in 2012, Evatt worked with glaciologists to show that iron meteorites have been noticeably missing from those discoveries. In fact, only 0.7 percent of the meteorites gathered from the 'meteorite stranding zones' are iron-based - compared to 5.5 percent of the meteorites collected from different places here on Earth.
"Meteorite collection facts shows that iron and stony-iron meteorites are suggestively under-represented from these sections as compared with all other sites on Earth," Evatt and colleagues wrote in a paper in Nature Communications last year.
The team hypothesizes that the iron meteorites are getting heated up by sunlight in Antarctica because of their metallic content, and melting the ice surrounding them. This then causes them to sink and get stuck below the surface.
They concluded that the meteorites are most likely hidden as a thinly distributed layer, just a few centimeters underneath the surface of the Antarctic ice - which means they wouldn't be that hard to recover, but have been concealed from previous meteorite-hunting expeditions. Their approved mission proposal will use new technology based on metal-detectors to scan for the buried meteorites.
It Is Not Yet Absolute That Scientists Could Be Able To Find These Rocks
The team will test the technology next year on the Arctic island of Svalbard, and make an initial visit to Antarctica in 2019. The main expedition is predicted to take place in early 2020, they wanted to find out if their hypothesis is correct.
"The whole viewpoint of a layer of missing meteorites in Antarctica came out of a discussion at an interdisciplinary workshop, between a group of applied mathematicians and glaciologists, way back in 2012," said Evatt.
"Having then, it turned those initial ideas into firm scientific cognitive agenda, we now have the opportunity to put our mathematical hypothesis to the riskiest test."
Until they get down there, there's no way of knowing where Antarctica's meteorites are hiding - or if they're even there at all. But because we can learn so much from them, we're glad scientists will soon get the chance to explore and find them.
