For immediate release: November 19, 2003
For more information, contact Susan Griffith at 216-368-1004 or susan.griffith@case.edu

CLEVELAND—Some professors go to great distances for their research, and Christopher Cokinos, an assistant professor of English at Utah State University, is no exception.

Cokinos is traveling thousands of miles to the bottom of Earth to join Case Western Reserve University Geologist Ralph Harvey, director of the National Science Foundation's Antarctic Search for Meteorite Program (ANSMET), and team members of the 2003-04 expedition. He wants to understand what compels meteorite hunters to brave some of the planet's coldest temperatures to find these rocks that fell from the heavens.

He will make the expedition as a non-fiction literary writer through the National Science Foundation's Antarctic Visiting Artists Program. The polar program has inspired new works by visual artists, musicians and writers who have experienced life on the world's coldest frozen desert.

In its 27th expedition to Antarctica, ANSMET will visit the LaPaz Icefields about 350 km from the South Pole Station. The area was not explored in detail until last year during a reconnaissance mission to evaluate the icefield's potential for meteorite collecting. The field showed promise with the collection of 250 meteorites in two weeks and yielded an unusual specimen.

Case Senior Research Associate Nancy Chabot from the department of geological sciences will travel with this year's team. She also was a member of last year's ANSMET team, which recovered LAP02205, a lunar basalt meteorite hailed by the Johnson Space Center as "unlike any lunar meteorite in our collection." The Johnson Space Center receives and categorizes all meteorites collected by ANSMET to distribute to researchers around the world.

While searching for extraterrestrial specimens, Cokinos will collect not only meteorites as a working member of the team but information for his new book about the great meteorite hunters of the past centuries. Harvey and his ANSMET team will be among those hunters, whose stories and experiences he will tell. ANSMET is in its 28th year.

While meteorites can appear as ordinary lumps of stone, Cokinos wants to show some of the deeper connections these rocks have to the universe and each other. His book will include Cokinos personal memoirs, folk lore, science of meteorites and the personal stories of the meteorite collectors.

photo courtesy of Utah State University Author Christopher Cokinos will travel to the Antarctic with the Case Western Reserve University meteor hunting team.

"Meteorite hunters are obsessed. Stories about these people are fascinating," stated Cokinos from his home in Utah.

His story will begin with a falling rock in 1803 in France where for the first time scientists recognized that rocks can come out of the sky. He also plans to write about the wife of a Kansan homesteader, who refused to abandon the rocks her husband found in the field and campaigned scientists across the country to verify them as meteorites.

According to Cokinos, Harvey Nininger, a biologist from McPherson College, is considered one of the greatest meteorite hunters of all time. Nininger gave up his teaching position during the Depression and went around the countryside enlisting support from farmers and school children to search for rock in their plowed fields.

Cokinos, who is fascinated with science writing from a literary point of view, is the author of Hope is the Thing with Feathers: Personal Chronicles of Vanished Birds. He chronicles the lives of six extinct birds. He recently won the $35,000 Whiting Writer's Award from the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation as an emerging talented writer. He is also the editor of Isotope: A Journal of Nature and Science Writing.

About Case Western Reserve University

Case is among the nation's leading research institutions. Founded in 1826 and shaped by the unique merger of the Case Institute of Technology and Western Reserve University, Case is distinguished by its strengths in education, research, and service. Located in Cleveland, Case offers nationally recognized programs in the Arts and Sciences, Dentistry, Engineering, Law, Management, Medicine, Nursing, and Social Sciences. http://www.case.edu.

–Case–

 

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