The objective of the mission, also composed of VUB researcher Ryoga Maeda and several international scientists, was to investigate new areas of meteorite accumulation around the Belgian Princess Elisabeth Antarctica Polar Station. Using satellite images and GPS coordinates, the team set out to discover the potential of several areas of interest, identified thanks to the work of Veronica Tollenaar, a thesis student in glaciology at the ULB.
“Going on an adventure to explore unknown areas is exciting”, emphasizes Vinciane Debaille. “However, we also had to deal with the fact that the reality on the ground is much more difficult than the beauty of satellite images.” The team was able to benefit from the experience of the explorer and head of polar missions at the Alain Hubert station, who was able to open roads to avoid dangerous areas made up of crevasses. The conditions of the mission were harsh, the team having camped in -10°C and covered tens of kilometers in sastrugis, snow dunes formed by the winds.
The mission bore fruit since the blue ice zone of Nils Larsen, about sixty kilometers from the station, was recognized as an accumulation zone worthy of a revisit. The 7.6 kilo meteorite is also a great discovery. Once brought back to Brussels, it will be thawed under controlled conditions in the laboratory at the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences, before being analyzed.
In total, more than 600 meteorites were discovered in the Nansen blue ice field during three VUB-ULB and NIPR (Japan Antarctic Research Institute) missions funded, in particular, by the federal science policy ( Belspo).