Geology Reference
In-Depth Information
collection at the University. His letter appeared under the
title “Meteorite Museum” in
Magma,
a small newsletter
on petrology. Here he used the term
meteorite museum
to
refer to a naturally occurring collection of differing
species of meteorites.
Dr. Gorai wrote that Dr. Yoshida of Hokkaido University
had greeted him in his laboratory one day in the fall of
1968 just before Yoshida's departure for the 10th Japanese
expedition to Antarctica:
meteorites or
getemonos
had been meant as a half joke.
But he now was searching for possible explanations of the
formation of meteorite concentrations on the ice.
Searches for meteorite concentrations were then formally
incorporated into the work schedules of the glaciology
group of JARE-14 in the polar summer of 1975-1976. In
that season, when the field team was deliberately searching
for meteorites rather than just picking them up in the
course of other work, the team returned from the same
large ice patch in the Yamato Mountains with a spectacular
collection of 663 more specimens!
When this news reached Cassidy, he called Mortimer
Turner, the program manager in the Division of Polar
Programs at the NSF, and reported this figure. Turner
reconsidered the situation. He told Cassidy that the panel
had just declined his proposal again, but he advised him
to add this new information and resubmit his proposal
immediately; he thought it might pass this time. And
indeed it did. Cassidy was approved to lead a team of two
members to search for meteorites out of McMurdo
Station in December and January of 1976-1977.
When Dr. Nagata arrived for his next visit to Pittsburgh,
Cassidy hastened to inform him that his proposal had been
accepted, and he planned to search for meteorites out of
McMurdo Station in the polar summer of 1976-1977.
Nagata cordially congratulated him, and then he delivered
a profound blow: he told Cassidy that he was planning to
send a man to McMurdo to search for meteorites in that
same season! Bill was thunderstruck. There had been no
suggestion of possibly working together, and the very
thought of a competitive search out of McMurdo left him
speechless. But Bill soon learned that JARE had had a
cooperative arrangement with the U.S. program at
McMurdo for a number of years. So he realized that Nagata
could send a meteorite hunter there whenever he chose.
Meanwhile, Bill had so much to do that he soon stopped
worrying about how things might turn out with Nagata.
I sent him off saying that the rock samples around the Syowa base
do not continue to interest me because I have plenty of them. This
time please get me a meteorite, or some
getemonos
(uncommonly
odd rocks) as a souvenir.
Yoshida spent a year and a half in Antarctica (because
the trip on an icebreaker from Japan to Syowa was too
long for a return after a single summer), and it was May or
June of 1970 when he visited Dr. Gorai again. At that time,
Gorai was away, so Yoshida left a bagful of samples with
Mr. Sugiyama of the laboratory. Several days later, Sugiyama
brought the bag to Gorai, who had completely forgotten
about his own request for meteorites or
getemonos
as a
souvenir. So he decided to open the bag sometime later on.
On his next trip to Tokyo, Yoshida visited Gorai and
reminded him that he had brought him the
getemonos
as
requested. At last, Gorai remembered that he had asked
Yoshida for meteorites or some
getemonos
. He opened
the bag, not really expecting anything special, and found
something very odd inside. In
Magma
, Gorai wrote:
The colors are dark gray and gray-green and the shapes are rounded
and covered with a thin skin; they looked something like meteorites
but it seemed incomprehensible that such various kinds of mete-
orites are found in the very limited area near the Yamato Mts.
I thought they were some sort of ordinary moraine rocks and that
they were weathered by the special environment of Antarctica. So,
half-believing and half-doubting, I was more or less convinced, at
95% of my confidence level, that they were not meteorites. But, just
in case, I took pictures of them and weighed them and had thin
sections made of them. I was surprised at the thin sections; they
were all meteorites: 8 of them are chondrites and 1 is an achondrite.
Literally, I was astonished and sent a wire with this news to
Mr. Yoshida. Under the circumstance, the details of the meteorite
collection in Antarctica will be presented soon by Yoshida et al. in
1971. I have decided to ask them to investigate from the standpoint
of glaciology how the “Museum of Meteorites” had formed. I also
want to proceed in mineralogical, petrological, and cosmochemical
research of the samples, consulting appropriate people.
1.4. THE U.S. ANTARCTIC SEARCH FOR
METEORITES GETS ORGANIZED
One of Cassidy's first problems was to decide whom he
should invite to accompany him to Antarctica. At just
about that time, he received a letter from Edward Olsen,
the curator of minerals at the Field Museum in Chicago.
Ed had read the abstracts of the meeting at Davos and
decided that further searches for meteorite concentrations
should be made in Antarctica. He contacted his friend
Carleton B. Moore, director of the Center for Meteorite
Studies at Arizona State University, and proposed that
they submit a joint proposal to search for meteorites in
Antarctica. Carleton had been a reviewer of Cassidy's
third proposal, so he told Ed he was too late. Then, after
proper hesitancy, Carleton broke the rules and told Ed
It is interesting to note that in Yoshida's article of 1971
he reports that members of the field party said it seemed
easy to recognize the meteorites because they were black
rocks on the bare white ice. However, these black rocks
were unrecognizable to Gorai when they came out of the
bag in which they had been packed and carried for so long.
But when he saw the thin sections he sent a telegram to
Yoshida, saying: “All were found to be meteorites!” Then
he wrote Yoshida a letter listing the differing species of the
meteorites. It was Gorai's list that the Shimas reported on
in Davos. Gorai added that his earlier letter requesting
