ANTARCTICA: A TREASURE–TROVE FOR PLANETARY SCIENCES. AUSTRALASIAN MICROTEKTITES FROM EAST ANTARCTICA

The planetary science community has benefitted greatly from research in Antarctica. The discovery of large accumulations of meteorites in blue ice fields on the polar plateau since 1969 and of cosmic dust in Antarctic ice, snow and supraglacial moraines as well as in loose sediment traps in the Transantarctic Mountains since the late 1980s has had a tremendous impact on the planetary science community. Over the last 50 years tens of thousands of meteorite specimens and cosmic dust particles have been recovered by Japanese, US, European, Chinese and Korean polar programs. This enormous research effort has provided the international planetary science community with the opportunity to study an extraordinary number of samples from a large variety of planetary bodies, greatly advancing our knowledge of the origin and evolution of the solar system.