Renji Naruse
The Japanese glaciologist who found the first meteorite on the Yamato ice field in December 1969, opening up Antarctica's meteorite treasure.
Key facts
- Nationality
- Japanese
- Field
- Glaciologist
Renji Naruse was one of a group of glaciologists on the tenth Japanese Antarctic Research Expedition, surveying the movement and thickness of the East Antarctic ice sheet near the Yamato Mountains in 1969.
On 21 December 1969, while extending a survey line across bare blue ice, Naruse came across a dark stone lying on the surface. Over the following days the team found more, nine in all. Back in Japan, the petrologist Masao Gorai examined them and found something surprising: they were of several different kinds, including ordinary chondrites, an enstatite chondrite, a carbonaceous chondrite and a diogenite.
Nine meteorites from at least five different falls, lying close together, could not be chance. The glaciologists suggested that the moving ice was gathering meteorites. Stones that fall over a vast area are buried in snow and carried slowly in the ice, sometimes for tens of thousands of years. Where the flow is blocked by mountains, the ice is pushed upwards and worn away by wind, leaving the meteorites stranded on the surface.
The discovery transformed meteorite science. Japanese and American searches soon recovered thousands of meteorites from the ice, and Antarctica has since yielded more than 45,000, including the first known meteorites from the Moon and many from Mars.
On the timeline
- December 1969The first Antarctic ice field meteorites