The Penn Stater Magazine

Rock Hunting—in the Antarctic?

December 27, 2009 at 3:40 pm Tina Hay Leave a comment

One of Abreu's colleagues shows off a meteorite the team found.

A Penn State DuBois faculty member is down in the Antarctic right now, spending six weeks as part of a team of researchers collecting rocks. Well, OK, not just rocks—meteorites.

Neyda Abreu, who teaches math and geology at DuBois, is part of a project called ANSMET, which stands for the Antarctic Search for Meteorites. She posted a blog entry today in which she describes what it’s like to bop around the Antarctic icesheet on snowmobiles.

(If the link above takes you to someone else’s blog entry, just look for the Dec. 27th posting called “The Ski-Doo People.”)

The ANSMET project has been going on for more than three decades: It started in 1976 and currently is led by a guy named Ralph Harvey, who is a professor at Case Western Reserve University.

Some of the meteorites the team finds are a little, uh, small.

Apparently Antarctica is a great place to collect meteorites, “the premier place on this planet,” according to the ANSMET Web site:

Meteorites don’t fall preferentially on Antarctica—they fall randomly all over the globe, and Antarctica is just an easy place to find them. One of the more obvious reasons is that it’s the perfect place to look for anything falling from the sky, an immense white and blue sheet. Essentially, if you go out onto the icesheet, where the nearest rock is 3,000 meters straight down, any rock you find on the surface almost certainly fell there from outer space.

Collecting those meteorites can help scientists understand more about the origins and nature of our solar system, as they explain on the ANSMET Web site.

The eight researchers on this year’s ANSMET team come from seven different institutions, including Penn State, the University of Colorado, and NASA, among others. Team members post a blog entry just about every day.

Tina Hay, editor

Entry filed under: Faculty research, Penn State DuBois. Tags: ANSMET, Antarctic Search for Meteorites, Antarctica, meteorites, Neyda Abreu, Ralph Harvey.