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UA Scientist Heads To Antarctica As Part Of Meteorite-Search Team

University of Arizona News Services

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From: Lori Stiles, UA News Services, 520-621-1877, lstiles@u.arizona.edu

Contact(s): Timothy D. Swindle, 520-621-4128, timswindle@ccit.arizona.edu
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October 29, 1997

UA scientist heads to Antarctica as part of meteorite-search team

EDITORS: Swindle will be available for interviews in Tucson through Nov. 2
only.

Timothy D. Swindle has been studying meteorites for the past 15 years.
Now he's heading to Antarctica to hunt them.

By the time he hits the high, ice-desert polar plateau in December,
maximum daytime temperatures will hover between minus 20 degrees
and plus 10 degrees Fahrenheit. And this is summer, so the sun never sets.
Returning Antarctic meteorite hunters say they miss darkness, and the color
green. Why go?

"I have never found a meteorite. I have an urge to find a great meteorite.
And I get to go to a place that people who have visited say is absolutely
gorgeous," said Swindle, an associate professor of planetary sciences at
The University of Arizona in Tucson. He is on a team of eight going to the
South Pole as part of the 1997-98 Antarctic Search for Meteorites program
(ANSMET).

Swindle, 42, who joined the UA in 1986, specializes in analyzing the noble
gases in extraterrestrial materials to understand the chronology of the
solar system. His research projects include determining the ages of impact
craters, finding when the earliest solids formed in the solar system and
discovering when liquid water flowed on Mars.

Roughly 3,000 meteorites were known before 1976, when the National
Science Foundation Office of Polar Programs funded the first of its annual
ANSMET expeditions, Swindle said. ANSMET researchers since have
recovered another 8,000 meteorites. These are curated at the NASA
Johnson Space Center in Houston and ultimately belong to the
Smithsonian Institution. Scientists apply for ANSMET meteorite samples
for study to an NSF-funded committee of meteorite experts called the
Meteorite Working Group, a body on which Swindle has served.

ANSMET meteorites currently represent "the only reliable, continuous
source of new, non-microscopic extraterrestrial material, and will continue
to be until future planetary sample-return missions are successful," said
Ralph P. Harvey of Case Western Reserve University, principal investigator
of the ANSMET program. "Their continued retrievel is the cheapest and only
guaranteed way to recover new things from worlds beyond the Earth,"
Harvey said in his extensive Web page at
http://www.cwru.edu/artsci/geolog/ANSMET/.

Swindle and Harvey talked about the possibility of Swindle joining an
ANSMET team a few years ago. Swindle was invited to join the 1997-98
team early this year. He quickly telephoned Guy Consolmagno of the
Vatican Observatory and the UA Steward Observatory, a member of the
1996-97 ANSMET team. Despite some illnesses, bad weather and a
greater-than-usual number of visits from film crews, Consolmagno and
his six colleagues collected 390 meteorites last year.

Swindle's team will fly from Christchurch, New Zealand, to McMurdo
Station, Antarctica, about Dec. 1. There they will pack all the food stores
and supplies they need for six weeks or more on the ice. Each team
member has his or her own snowmobile and at least two nansen sledges
piled high with supplies. Swindle and his teammates also put in a few days'
training on some necessary field routines -- pitching tents, operating
snowmobiles, and practicing crevasse rescues. There are significant
crevasse hazards surrounding potential meteorite-bearing fields.

After about a week at McMurdo, the expedition is flown a couple of hundred
miles inland to the meteorite stranding surface selected as the season's
field site. In Swindle's case, the target area is near Walcott Neve, south
of the Queen Alexandra Range in the 1,900-mile length of the Transantarctic
Mountains. Unofficially, this meteorite-rich hunting ground is called "Foggy
Bottom." The volume of ice flowing through the Walcott is diminishing
rapidly, according to Harvey. Aside from the meteorites it offers, this area
may be a useful example of how the East Antarctic ice sheet is responding
to climate change, Harvey noted in his Web page.

Antarctica is showered with no more meteorites than anywhere else on
Earth, Swindle said. But it's easy to spot rocks against blue-white ice. Also,
the East Antarctic ice sheet flows from the center to the edges of the South
Pole continent, and meteorites naturally collect where the sheet flows
against the mountains. The tell-tale signature of a meteorite as opposed to
a rock is a millimeter-thick black fusion crust that covers the surface,
Swindle said. The crust formed when the rock melted by friction as it sailed
through the Earth's atmosphere.

After six weeks on the East Antarctic ice sheet, Swindle said he's sure
he'll want to return to civilization, and, particularly, to his wife and two
kids.

But finding a special meteorite would be a worthwhile prize. The most
special meteorite to him would be a meteorite from Venus, Swindle said.
He and a student have thought about how a Venusian meteorite could be
identified. No one's found one, yet.