- One of the big ways
that working in Antarctica
is a little bit different
than a lot of the other places
that we hunt for fossils is
how we find them on the surface
because Antarctica is
technically a desert, right?
It's not getting a lot of precipitation
and things are very, very
cold there most of the time.
You actually don't get a lot of,
at least in the areas that we're at,
you don't get a lot of unweathered,
or weathered rock and kind
of pebbly rock at the surface
where places like Ghost Ranch, New Mexico
or the Four Corners area of Utah
or kinda Badlands National Park
when you kinda picture
those or look at images,
you see that very pebbly texture
of the rock on the surface
that we sometimes call popcorn,
'cause it looks like it's breaking apart
because it's been getting wet
and then the clays and everything
have expanded and contracted
when it heats and dries again,
and that breaks up the
rock on the surface,
and we don't have that
as much in Antarctica,
'cause we're not getting
that precipitation
and that much variation
in the temperature.
And so, when we're finding things,
we're generally finding flecks
and bits of bone and stuff
that aren't kind of broken
apart and kind of strewn down,
a little channel with something like that.
We're finding them in place.
That's really handy because
the stuff on the surface
isn't as chipped and busted and broken up,
but it does mean that the rock itself
is still very hard and so,
most of the excavation we're doing
at this last trip in the Sakhalin glacier,
was with large, kind of concrete saws.
These big rock saws where we would kind of
cut channels around the fossil,
and then use hand tools to
kind of chisel out large blocks
of the fossil.
Where our dinosaurs are actually from,
on Mount Kirkpatrick near
the the Beardmore glacier,
that rock is a very, very hard,
kind of silicified sedimentary rock
and it's almost like
concrete, and so there,
we use rock saws as well,
but we also even had to bring in big
50 or 60-pound jackhammers,
some electric jackhammers,
some drills where we're actually
drilling holes in and then,
sinking in kind of these
little feathers in wedges,
so kind of two little
iron spikes on the side
with a central spike that you'd put in
and then hammer down to
kind of help split the rock
along a line of holes that
you've bored in there,
and we're just trying to calve off big,
800-pound chunks of block
that we can take back.
At that site where the dinosaurs are from,
you can't have a block that's so big
that it can't be moved at all, right?
You get down to a size that at least
a couple of people can get around it
and kinda shimmy it and shift it,
maybe get it on a slat
or something that they can
slide and pull it down.
But for the dinosaur site,
what we had to do is get
those blocks shored up,
we would then wrap them in a big cargo net
with a chain and a hook on it,
and we would have our
helicopter pilots would come up
and have to hover over, in most cases,
it was our mountaineer, Pierre
Braddock from New Zealand,
that would have to actually
make that connection
to hook that cargo net up,
and then the helicopter would
lift off and take that off.
And they have certain specifications too,
so they, on the one side,
they don't wanna take
a whole bunch of weight
'cause they're flying at
altitude, but on the other side,
they want the jacket,
the weight that we put in there
to be above a minimum amount
so that it doesn't swing around so much
when they're flying back to camp.
We tried to kinda get that
sweet spot for every jacket
we were pulling out.
(wondrous music)
