Paper: Times Herald Record City: Middletown, New York Date: Friday, October 22, 1976 Page: 29
Meteorite find puzzles scientists
New York Times News Service
BETHLEHEM, Pa. - Within a radius of a few miles in Antarctica, Japanese scientists have found, spread across the ice, more than 1,000 meteorites of diverse types. The discovery is believed to be without precedent, and the Japanese say no ready explanation is known.
In the past, there have been meteorite falls that showed the landscape with fragments, but the Antarctic discovery consists of numerous kinds of meteorites that presumably fell successively over a prolonged period. It is estimated that the entire earth receives about one meteorite a day.
The Japanese find was described in a interview here Wednesday by Dr. Masako Shima, whose husband collected some of the specimens. Dr. Shima also discussed the finds at the annual meeting of the Meteoritical Society being held here at Lehigh University. The society is an international association of specialists in meteorites and related subjects.
The meteorites found on three successive Japanese expeditions lie near Yamato Mountains, inland from the Japanese Showa Base. The first nine specimens were found in 1969. Dr. Shima said she has studied four of them, and that all were of different types.
On an expedition in 1974, a rich field was discovered, with 683 specimens, ranging in size up to 12 pounds. Then last year, another 330 were found. The discoveries of all three expeditions lay within two areas close to one another and each 10 miles on a side.
According to Dr. Shima, who is with the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry West Germany, only one of the specimens is an iron meteorite. The rest are stones, or of other types such as carbonaceous chondrites.
Dr. Edward Olsen, meteorite specialist at the field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, plans to visit Antarctica this December, when the summer begins in the southern hemisphere, hoping to find specimens on the side of the continent opposite the Japanese base.
Antarctica is ideal for such collections, he pointed out in an interview here, because the black specimens stand out so clearly against a white background. He suspects past estimates as to the relative abundances of various kinds of meteorites have been grossly biases because the irons and other clearly "foreign" types stand out among terrestrial rocks. That that look like ordinary rocks tend to be overlooked.
For this reason, as pointed out Wednesday morning by Glenn I. Huss of the American Meteorite Laboratory in Denver, Colo., a situation like that in the Yamato Mountains, where only objects that have fallen from the sky are found, offers a special opportunity to identify new types of meteorites. He noted that even where falls have been recorded by camera networks, the objects often have not been found. The Yamato collection also offers a special opportunity to determine the true distribution of types.
This is turn would bear directly on arguments as to where meteorites come from - to what extent from shattered asteroids, from material that condensed as the solar system was forming or even predates the formation of that system.
One explanation of the Yamato collection, Olsen believes, may e that, for thousands of millions of years, ice from the Antarctic interior has been flowing toward the mountains until blocked by them.
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