Ralph Harvey
The geologist who has led ANSMET's Antarctic meteorite searches since the early 1990s.
Key facts
- Nationality
- American
- Field
- Geologist
Ralph P. Harvey is a geologist at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. He first went to Antarctica as a student with ANSMET, the Antarctic Search for Meteorites, and in 1991 took over as its principal investigator from William Cassidy.
Under Harvey's leadership, ANSMET teams have spent most southern summers camped on the high ice of the Transantarctic Mountains, often for six weeks at a time. Team members ride snowmobiles in long lines across blue ice, stopping to collect any dark stone. Each meteorite is photographed, given a field number and its position recorded by satellite, then sealed in a clean bag without being touched by hand and kept frozen.
The searches under Harvey have recovered many thousands of meteorites, including rare lunar and Martian meteorites, and the total for the programme now runs to more than 20,000. Some seasons have included teachers and writers as team members, so that the public can learn how the work is done.
Harvey has also studied meteorites himself, especially the Martian meteorite ALH 84001, and helped to show how its carbonate minerals might have formed without the help of life.