Keizo Yanai
The Japanese geologist who collected thousands of Antarctic meteorites and helped start the joint search that grew into ANSMET.
Key facts
- Born
- 1941
- Died
- 2018
- Nationality
- Japanese
- Field
- Geologist and curator
Keizo Yanai was born in Fukushima prefecture and trained as a petrologist. He joined the Japanese Antarctic Research Expeditions and spent nearly five years in Antarctica over seven trips.
In the 1973 to 1974 season he led a meteorite search near the Yamato Mountains, where nine meteorites had first been found in 1969. In about two weeks his team picked up 663 meteorites from the blue ice. He also put forward a model of how moving ice concentrates meteorites against mountain barriers. In 1979 a larger Japanese search of the same area found more than 3,500.
In December 1976 Yanai joined the American geologist William Cassidy and the curator Edward Olsen on the first American search in Victoria Land. He found the first meteorite in that region and helped collect hundreds of stones at the Allan Hills in the following season, including ALH 77005, the first Martian meteorite found in Antarctica. This joint effort grew into ANSMET, the Antarctic Search for Meteorites.
Yanai was for many years the curator of the meteorite collection at Japan's National Institute of Polar Research in Tokyo, one of the largest in the world, and later a professor at Iwate University. An asteroid, 9206 Yanaikeizo, is named after him.
On the timeline
- 1974Hundreds of meteorites from the Yamato ice
- December 1976The first American Antarctic search
- 1979Thousands of Yamato-79 meteorites