ANTARCTICA AS A PLACE TO SEARCH FOR METEORITES? YOU MUST BE KIDDING!

The concept followed no evolutionary path. It was suddenly there, as bright as the comic-strip light bulb that signifies a new idea: meteorites are concentrated on the ice in Antarctica! The occasion was the thirty-sixth annual meeting of the Meteoritical Society, which took place during the last week of August 1973 in Davos, Switzerland. I was listening to a paper by Makoto and Masako Shima, a Japanese husband and wife team who are both chemists. He was describing their analyses of some stony meteorites. These specimens were interesting to me because they had been recovered in Antarctica. The pre-meeting abstract of the paper mentioned four meteorites that had been found within a 5 × 10 km area, lying on the ice at the Yamato Mountains (see Figure 1.1). I was quite aware of how rare meteorites really are, and as far as I knew, when meteorites are found near each other, as these had been, they are invariably fragments of a single fall. This was my assumption in the present case, and I had attended this presentation because of a long-standing, general interest in Antarctica, rather than a specific interest in the meteorites to be described. Actually, the abstract made it clear that these specimens were of distinctly different types, but I had been skimming and had not read that far. The key word, so far as I was concerned, had been Antarctica.