The team then used a simple, elegant mathematical model to scale up these results to Antarctica. In the lab, stony and iron meteorite migrations were pretty indistinguishable, but this model showed that on a longer timescale, the iron meteorites could sink into the ice far quicker than the stony ones. These results, described in a 2016 study, made it seem possible that a huge number of iron meteorites were in hiding.

The next step: prove it. By December 2018, funded by a significant grant, the first U.K.-led Antarctic search mission was out in the wilds of that frosted land, hunting for meteorites—a proof-of-concept run for the climactic meteorite search a year later.

Scouting out meteorites on the surface is one thing, but finding buried iron meteorites is an entirely different ball game.

In Antarctica, some areas of blue ice—named for its ethereal, vivid hue—are so compressed and lacking in trapped air bubbles that they look like glass. It feels like “you’re walking on air,” Genge says, and any patches of snow on top “looks like clouds.” Standing there makes you feel like being on top of the world at the end of the world. In more practical terms, the ice can be almost transparent, providing an ideal window into the realm below. But no one had ever been out in blue-ice areas looking for sunken meteorites before, so the team didn’t know whether they would contain any, Evatt says.

It's not simply a matter of zooming around and taking in otherworldly views. Fun though this is, Joy says it’s “a bit of a chilly business when the wind is blowing.” At the same time, concentrating on scanning the ground for meteorites while making sure to drive safely and not get lost can sometimes be exhausting.

Read: How to survive winter in Antarctica

The iron meteorite-detection technology attached to the snowmobiles is both bespoke and complicated. It is analogous to land-mine detectors, but has some key design differences. Meteorite detectors don’t need to be as sensitive. Land mines try very hard not to be found, Evatt says, but large lumps of iron are fairly conspicuous to metal detectors, so long as you know where to look. However, land-mine detectors don’t like being bashed around, which is why the metal detectors on the snowmobiles had to be built to be far hardier. They need to deal with being “banged around left, right, and center” across the continent, Evatt says.

Land-mine detectors also dislike being moved too rapidly, which is problematic for the team: Researchers have to be able to detect iron meteorites in real time while they zip about. Thanks to all the computing power you can fit on the snowmobiles, that’s possible, but they have to maintain a speed of about nine miles per hour, because the signal-sorting algorithms can’t handle moving any faster or slower. Tests in Svalbard, a series of islands in the high Arctic, revealed other quirks; the detectors, for example, experience different types of signal noise on snow compared with ice.