Dean chats with Scott VanBommel, meteorite hunter and senior research scientist at Washington University in St. Louis. Listen to learn what it takes to find a meteorite (you'll have to start looking down).
A note from Scott VanBommel regarding his personal meteorite collection: "ANSMET is funded by public money (i.e., NASA) and every meteorite it has ever collected is made available for the community for research. Meteorites I own were purchased from private collections, and are meteorites that were originally found in Chile or NW Africa etc. I do not want anyone to think that Antarctica meteorite hunters keep anything we find, we do not."
Homework assignment:
Think you've got yourself a bona fide space rock?
Send us a picture at lookingup@wvxu.org or post them on social media using #lookinguppod
Additional resources referenced in this episode:
- East Liverpool homeowner finds rock that could be from space
- Meteorites: Witness From Beyond the Times
- The Dash for the South Pole
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:
Looking Up is transcribed using a combination of AI speech recognition and human editors. It may contain errors. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting in print.
Dean: It's late at night. Maybe you're driving home. Maybe you're walking from a store. Maybe you're in an outdoor hot tub. Then, suddenly, you look up to see a streak of light across the inky black sky. That is a classic shooting star, a meteor streaming through the atmosphere. Most meteors are super small and burn up in the atmosphere, but some, very rarely, may survive to hit the ground.
Those extraterrestrial rocks are then called meteorites. From the studios of Cincinnati Public Radio, I'm your host, Dean Regas, and this is Looking Up, the show that takes you deep into the cosmos or just to the telescope in your backyard to learn more about what makes this amazing universe of ours so great.
My guest today is Scott VanBommel, Senior Research Scientist at Washington University in [00:01:00] St. Louis, Missouri. So meteorites come from all sorts of places, but the vast majority of them originate from asteroids in the asteroid belt.
Narrator: Jupiter's strong gravitational pull captured millions of planetary ne'er do wells in the asteroid belt.
Scientists have named 5, 000 minor planets orbiting the sun between Jupiter and Mars, still other debris evaded Jupiter's gravity and exists in orbits that cross Earth's path.
Dean: So pieces of these little rocks circling around the sun will break off, spiral around the sun some more, and then eventually run into the Earth and then land on the ground.
So it's quite a journey for these space rocks to get to you. And as far as rarity goes, There's only been about 13 or so of them ever found in the state of Ohio
Derek Steyer, WFMJ: An East Liverpool family discovered something they say is from out of this world. One man was walking outside his home saturday night when he heard a rock hit the ground.[00:02:00]
Caitlin McCarthy spoke with him about that rock that scientists tell us just might be a souvenir from space.
Dean: So 13 ish, there's some question marks about some of them, but 13 ish rocks found in Ohio originated from outer space, ever. It's a big state and that's not a lot of rocks. And then there's NWA's, so they add this prefix to them and that stands for Northwestern Africa.
And these are more stony types. So they look like normal stones and normal rocks, more so than shards of metal and that kind of thing. So you look at these and you're like, well, wait a second. This just looks like a rock from my backyard. Why, you know, why would this even stand out? Because you can't just test every rock on the ground.
So, how they found these is they landed in the Sahara Desert. And all you gotta do is walk around the desert, and if there's a rock on top of the sand, chances are it came from up above. So, it's pretty cool to just walk around, you can pick up a meteorite. So it gets me [00:03:00] thinking, where would be another place on Earth where you could find meteorites on top of stuff really easily?
Hmm... Well, Scott, thanks so much for joining me today.
Scott: Thank you. My pleasure to be here.
Dean: So in the wide variety of jobs you've had, would it be safe to say that you're an official meteorite hunter?
Scott: Yeah, that is an official title that I've held at one point in time. Not too many people can put that on the resume.
Dean: And if one was to become a meteorite hunter and hunt for meteorites, where's the best place to go?
Scott: So I would recommend Antarctica. That's where I ended up going for, for my meteorite hunting, part of the ANSMET team, Antarctic search for meteorites. There's a, a number of properties in Antarctica that make it a prime location to look for meteorites.
But the one obvious drawback aside from the hostile weather is it's very difficult to get to.
Dean: [00:04:00] Yeah, how do you get there? Where do you fly to and from and how long did it take to get there?
Scott: It's a pretty lengthy journey. So to actually get to Antarctica, you first fly to Christchurch, New Zealand And then you board a military plane to McMurdo station That's just to get you to and from Antarctica actually getting around on the continent is an impressive feet of logistics and planning that involves a number of agencies.
Dean: How did this opportunity arise?
Scott: So ANSMET takes scientists, including graduate students as volunteers for their mission. And they've been going to Antarctica since the mid 1970s. And is a primary mechanism by which meteorites enter curation for scientific study. When I was a graduate student, I applied and applied again and applied again.
And it just so happened that they had someone that had to back out last minute. So I [00:05:00] was pulled off the bench for an experience of a lifetime. I was there during Antarctic summer. So arrived around US Thanksgiving and left in February. And it was 24 hour daylight the whole time. And the landing in New Zealand, when we got off continent, the, that first sunset emotional experience, just, you know, having not seen darkness or a sunset for several months at that point.
Dean: You know, you walk around anywhere in the Sahara desert, you just find a rock on the sand. You got a meteorite. Please tell me that's how it was in Antarctica. Anything on top of the snow. You're like, yeah, meteorite, meteorite, meteorite. Was it tough to find them or were they surprisingly easy?
Scott: So there's vast swaths of blue ice in Antarctica, particularly around the trans Antarctic mountains.
You can imagine, you know, you have this black rock that's been charred through coming through the earth's atmosphere, and it's just sitting on top of this blue [00:06:00] ice surrounded by frozen nothingness. It's pretty easy to spot from afar. It's a pretty fantastic place to hunt for meteorites, but a lot of the stones that we find are actually mixed in with terrestrial rocks from the mountain rages, kind of in a moraine type situation.
Dean: What were some of your favorite moments from your time in Antarctica? Just like the day to day living, the weather, the food, all that kind of stuff.
Scott: You know, the, the day to day you become really close with the, the people you're there with. In my case, there was Mountaineer, John Scott, Yiannis Baziotis from Athens and James Day from Scripps in San Diego.
And we made a habit as, as much as we could, even after a long day in the field, getting back to camp, getting everything ready for the next day to try and if not have dinner together then to get together in one of the tents, you know, four guys crammed into a tiny tent. And we would listen to John Scott read from the diary [00:07:00] of Antarctic explorers and the first people who tried to make it to the South Pole and what they went through.
Ernest Shackleton: We reached the point within 97 geographical miles of the South Pole. The only thing that stopped us from reaching the actual point was the lack of 50 pounds of food. Another party reached for the first time the South Magnetic Pole. Another party reached the summit of a great active volcano, Mount Erebus. I, Ernest Shackleton, have today March the 20th dictated this record.
Scott: It was really, especially touching considering we're very close to some of the areas where they traversed through trying to make that journey.
But the thing that really struck me the most with my time in Antarctica. It was just the difference in perspective. We're in the middle of Antarctica, hundreds of miles from anyone and you look in any [00:08:00] direction and you feel like you can see forever. There's crystal clear, but there's nothing around you but mountains and snow and ice.
And in this particular day, there was no wind. So as you can imagine, when there's nothing around you, there's no wind, there's no leaves rustling, there's no insects buzzing, there's no airplanes flying overhead, there's no fans humming from any equipment. For a couple seconds, for the first time in my life, I experienced pure, true silence.
It was just such a transformative moment because you just kind of see your home planet in this whole new way in a landscape that feels almost alien to what we're used to on a day to day basis.
Dean: What advice would you have for people who want to get started finding meteorites on their own?
Scott: It is pretty hard to tell the difference between Just a terrestrial rock [00:09:00] and weathered meteorite
that's been on the surface of earth for a while, unless you're in Northwest Africa or Antarctica, just because of erosion and the degradation of the materials. But if you can observe a fall and find it, that's probably your best chance. But one of the. The best ways and what I recommend to people who've reached out to me before to see if what they have is a meteorite or not, is if you can cut open the rock or break it open, look inside.
If you can see chondrules, which closest analog I can think of is like the Dippin' Dots ice cream, those little spherules that all get smushed together when the parent body was being formed. If you can see that, then that's a pretty good indication that you have a meteorite.
Dean: Well, Scott, this has been awesome chatting today.
Thanks so much. This has been a lot of fun.
Scott: Thank you. Appreciate it.
Dean: So maybe the question you're asking yourself is, do I have a meteorite in my house? Do I have a meteorite in my yard? Well, I got some bad news because after more than [00:10:00] 25 years in this field and people bringing me rocks all the time, not one, not one has been a meteorite.
And trust me, I want to find one. I want somebody to bring me a rock that's from space and I can say, yes, you got it. The only way that I can really, like, ease the tension is using the really, really bad old joke. I say, Oh, I'm really sorry. You don't have a meteorite. You have a meteorWRONG. Crickets? Yeah, that was bad.
That was real bad. But hey, it eases the tension because then they're like, Oh, that was a stupid joke. But keep collecting rocks and keep, oh, I don't want to say this, but okay, keep bringing them to me. Just be prepared to hear the meteorwrong joke. Looking up with Dean Regas is a production of Cincinnati Public Radio.
It's a creation by Kevin Reynolds and myself. Ella Rowen is our show producer and editor and yells, Space [00:11:00] rocks! Whenever I talk about meteorites. That's a worse joke than what I got, anyway. Marshall Verbsky assists with audio production, editing, and brings in his rocks from his yard to me, hoping they are meteorites.
They never are. Jenell Walton is our vice president of content, Ronny Salerno is our digital platforms manager, and Brittany Mayti is our social media coordinator. Our theme song is Possible Light by Ziv Moran, and our cover art is by Nicole Tiffany. Keep lookin up!
