Traverse to the Finger Ridges Meteorite Listing (19 KB with meteorite pictures
- Last updated 4/23/2005)
Finger Ridges
Finger Ridges (79º11'S 157º00'E) is a group of nunataks in the Darwin-Byrd Glacier Region (Darwin-Byrd-Figure 1 - 92 KB JPEG) which lies north of the Darwin Glacier. Bare ice is present along the upstream edge of the nunataks as well as on the downstream side and in cirque embayments of ice which flows northward into the Mulock Glacier drainage system.
During the 2000-2001 field season an ANSMET team made a helicopter-supported reconnaissance trip to an area of bare ice at the southwest end of Finger Ridges. The searchers conducted the search on foot for a couple of hours, finding three meteorite specimens. This success warranted a more extensive search. The following season, two ANSMET team members spent 6 days conducting snowmobile searches of the icefields in the vicinity of Finger Ridges. Though hampered by considerable new snow covering the ice, they found another 6 specimens, but confirmed that no significant meteorite concentration is present there. FIN45-Figure 1 (64 KB JPEG) is an enlarged portion of a Landsat image of the Finger Ridges area which shows the locations of the meteorites found there.
The team also spent some time traversing the nearby bare ice areas in the vicinity of the north end of Butcher Ridge. No meteorites were found as a result of that search effort.
FIN45-Table 1 gives a tally of the meteorite types discovered on the Finger Ridges icefields.
Acknowledgments; 2000-2001 ANSMET field party members conducting reconnaissance searches at Finger Ridges were Ralph Harvey, Bill Oefelein, and Melissa Strait. The 2001-2002 reconnaissance team consisted of Doug Mittlefehldt and John Schutt.
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