Collection of Yamato meteorites in the 1979-1980 field season, Antarctica

An 8-man oversnow traverse party of the 20th Japanese Antarctic Research Expedition (JARE-20) visited the Yamato Mountains in the 1979-1980 field season to search for Antarctic meteorites. After 991 meteorite specimens were collected by previous searches in the bare ice field near the Yamato Mountains in the eastern Queen Maud Land, existence of over 7000 meteorites was expected in the entire bare ice field. The party of the JARE-20 planned to collect about 1000 meteorites of them in one field season. In less than one month of actual activities, over 3300 meteorite specimens were collected on the bare ice between October 1979 and January 1980. About 2000 meteorites were concentrated in very small areas of the bare ice around massif A and JARE IV Nunataks, and over 1000 meteorites were also concentrated around the Minami-Yamato Nunataks. But in the bare ice areas northwest of the Yamato Mountains meteorites were not numerous. The collected specimens are chondritic metorites for the most part, and the finds included less than ten iron, over twenty carbonaceous chondrites (type 2 in majority), about one hundred achondrites (eucrites and diogenite in majority), and also included possibly many unique specimens. This collection was officially named Yamato-79 meteorites and each specimen was designated as Yamato-790001 to Yamato-79XXXX respectively in order of finding.