I wrote a chapter about Chris’s and my Bering Sea expedition. Hugh Powell wrote about Adélie penguins in Antarctica, Lonny Lippsett wrote about exploring the Arctic floor from an icebreaker, and Amy Nevala wrote about Greenland’s glaciers. Of course, Chris’s fantastic photos fill the book.

It’s been fun revisiting my memories of the Bering Sea in the last few days, since my copy arrived. I also answered some questions by e-mail for this nice item about it…and went on much too long. I just kept remembering all these lovely details about the trip. It was a great experience.

Right after I took this picture, I found out why the inspection guys were crawling all over my car – they couldn’t figure out how to open the gas tank cover. It’s a complicated maneuver. I stick my left arm in the trunk to pull on a plastic lever and use my right hand to push on the little door on the outside of the car. “You gotta do that every time you get gas?” one of the guys asked. I told him it’s one of the special features of my car. I think he was impressed. Or perhaps that look was pity. Anyway, my car passed.

Important tip: Go to the D.C. Vehicle Inspection Station the day after Christmas. I had a big pile of knitting to entertain me for an all-day wait in line, and I practically had the place to myself. I saw three other cars the whole time I was there.

To the driver I met while waiting for the inspection to finish: Hello! Great to meet you! This is the work I did in the Bering Sea.

Yes…yes, I do wish he’d needed a writer this time. Sigh.

These, however, are not meteorites:

The boxes and envelopes on the corner of that desk are rocks that people have sent in for the museum’s meteorite specialists to check out. (The big white bag on the right is leftover Halloween candy.) Here’s a tip: If you find a funky-looking rock in your backyard, there’s a really, really, really good chance that it’s just a rock. From Earth.

I even got to see a little piece of this meteorite – the one that made the big “Omg Life on Mars!” splash in 1996. It was in its own traveling case.

Gratuitous beautiful meteorite picture:

This is a slice of a pallasite. It’s like a naturally occurring piece of stained glass – gemstones in a matrix of iron and nickel. I totally want one. But they’re rare and expensive, and I’m pretty sure the museum’s crack meteorite team would’ve noticed if I’d taken this one with me.

This is a slice of a big hunk of nickel and iron that broke off from the core of some asteroid. It was collected in Antarctica. Meteorites fall everywhere on Earth, but they’re particularly easy to find on the Antarctic ice sheet, because there aren’t a lot of other black things. Also, the way the ice moves seems to concentrate them in a few places.

Extra fun – you can scroll down and read the comments. Ah, newspaper comment sections. They’re juvenile and abusive everywhere in the world. Actually, most of these are kinda funny, and only one person swore he’s deleting the link from his computer and never reading Die Welt again. He was apparently upset that this “revolution and milestone in the research” did not get the appreciation it deserves.

Yeah…I’m not sure “revolution” and “milestone” are the right words for this study. I’d classify it as “pretty neat.” The whole idea of building telescopes in Antarctica is totally awesome, but it’s not new. This is just one more suggestion about a good place to put them.

Project Gemini. Did you know what NASA project came between Mercury and Apollo? Yeah, neither did I. I wasn’t born yet, you see. But now I want to take a field trip down to the Air & Space Museum to check out the capsule they’ve got on display.

Polar Science. Ah, this one was fun. I like the poles. You will do better on this quiz if you have seen Encounters at the End of the World, the Werner Herzog documentary about Antarctica. It’s a great movie, so you should see it even if you don’t organize your life around doing better on my quizzes.

For all my Science Channel quizzes click here.