Geology Reference
In-Depth Information
newly discovered Aouelloul crater in Mauritania. Later
on, he examined the Campo del Cielo craters in the
Argentine chaco and a crater in the deserts of Chile. For
a time, in the 1950s, Cassidy must have held a world's
record for the number of meteorite impact craters he had
seen. His PhD thesis, at the Pennsylvania State University,
dealt with the high-temperature chemistry of meteorite
and tektite systems.
Many scientists agree that lunar material can be transferred to
Earth as a result of large impacts on the Moon. Such material has
not been recognized yet but would be concentrated in the same
manner as, and together with, concentrations of meteorites. Lunar
material, therefore, might also be recovered as a result of this
proposed work.
He had high hopes that the referees would share his
excitement. But in due time, his proposal was rejected.
The reasons for proposal denials are always kept secret to
protect the referees. However, we can hazard a guess or
two. First, most referees would be experienced members
of Antarctic teams familiar with the difficulties of living
and working, between storms, in the snow and ice. To
them, the idea of looking for meteorites there might
appear ludicrous; in fact, the word
ludicrous
surfaced at
one time, rightly or wrongly, having been leaked out by a
referee. Next, the question might be raised as to why we
should collect meteorites at all. By training and experi-
ence, most geologists are not interested in loose rocks,
which cannot yield direct clues to the formations from
which they are derived. Meteorites are the ultimate loose
rocks which, it then seemed, never could be matched to
their original sources. So meteorites might be of interest
to collectors and dealers but not to earth scientists. I was
made acutely aware of this attitude as late as 1978 when I
was preparing for my first trip to Antarctica on Cassidy's
team. More than once during visits to universities, I was
asked by professors and students: “Why do you want to
collect meteorites?” and “What would you want to do a
thing like that for?” Faced with questions like these, I
wondered how so many people could seem to be so
unaware that we were living in the Space Age.
The Space Age had dawned two decades earlier on 4
October 1957, when the Russians launched Sputnik I and
sent it beeping around the world. In the following year,
President Eisenhower announced the establishment of
NASA on 29 July 1958. And on 25 May 1961, President
John F. Kennedy declared that Americans would fly to
the Moon and return safely back to Earth within that
decade. So, by the time Cassidy submitted his proposal to
the NSF in 1973, six
Apollo
missions already had returned
from the Moon with samples of its crust and soils. There
was great public interest in space flight and the Moon but
not in meteorites, which may have seemed more than ever
like orphaned rocks from space.
Perhaps we may stop here to ask why Bill Cassidy was
so interested in meteorites. Cassidy had attended the
Institute for Meteoritics in Albuquerque, where he served
as a research assistant to the director, Dr. Lincoln LaPaz,
who took all his students to see Meteor Crater and its
irons. Cassidy won the first Fulbright Fellowship in mete-
oritics and spent a year investigating tektites, meteorites,
and craters in Australia and Thailand. On his way home,
he arranged through Theodore Monod, Director of
l'Institut Francais d'Afrique Noire in Dakar, to visit the
1.2.1. A Link with Japan
On arriving home to Pittsburgh from Davos in the fall
of 1973, Cassidy met with Professor Takesi Nagata, who
was paying one of his regular visits to the University of
Pittsburgh. He had been a visiting professor there since
1961, and he typically came to the department once or
twice a year to collaborate on research with two members
of the regular faculty. In his own topic,
Cassidy
[2003,
p. 19] describes the high honors accorded to Dr. Nagata
internationally. He was one of the few non-U.S. members
of the National Academy of Sciences, and in Japan the
emperor had designated him as a National Living
Intellectual Treasure. Furthermore, a few weeks later, on
29 September 1973, the National Institute of Polar
Research was opening in Tokyo with Takesi Nagata as
director general.
Cassidy assumed Dr. Nagata would know all about
the meteorite concentrations reported by Dr. Shima at
Davos. But Dr. Nagata pushed his chair away from his
desk, seeming to be quite taken aback to learn, in this way,
of meteorite concentrations that Japanese scientists had
collected four years earlier! A short description of them
had been published by the team leader, Dr. Masao Yoshida,
in 1971, and as we noted above, the Shimas had published
their results with Dr. Heinrich Hintenberger at Mainz early
in the summer of 1973. But neither Nagata nor Cassidy had
read these papers. Nagata immediately sent telegrams to
Japan asking for details, and he encouraged the current
field party, the 14th Japanese Antarctic Research Expedition
(JARE-14), in the Yamato Mountains, to collect more mete-
orites. During the remainder of that season, 1973-1974,
the Japanese team of glaciologists collected 12 more mete-
orites from the same patch of ice in the Yamato Mountains.
Cassidy added that news to his proposal and resubmitted
it to the NSF, which responded with the same negative
decision as before.
1.3. JAPANESE INTEREST IN ANTARCTIC
METEORITES
In Japan, an interest in Antarctic meteorites had arisen
rather casually, almost as a joke. The story begins with a
short letter written in 1970 by Professor Masao Gorai, of
the Tokyo University of Education, who kept a meteorite
