ANGELINA DOHRE
Special to The Leader
Every Friday at noon, the Fredonia chapter of Sigma Xi and the Scientific Research Society organizes a brown bag lecture on campus. This past week, professor emeritus Jack Berkley presented “Mars Meteorites: The Story Behind their Discovery,” in the Major Alice Conference Room in the Science Center.
Berkley’s main point of the presentation was to show off his findings that he, along with his colleague Jeff Taylor, had found from their studies of Mars meteorites.
“This goes back to when I was a graduate student at the University of New Mexico. I worked at the Institute of Meteoritics,” he said.
A mentor of Berkley’s, Klaus Klein, was the reason he became interested in the study of meteorites.
“[Klein] was of German origin, and he made his way over to the United States and became the head of the Institute of Meteoritics at the University of New Mexico,” Berkley said. “He added to the meteorite collection at the university by virtue of having, let’s say, borrowed some meteorites from the East Germans before he got on the train.”
At the start of the presentation, Berkley presented facts about Mars through visual photographs and statistics.
“[Mars] is one and half times further away from the sun than us. It’s a fairly close neighbor to us. It’s half the size of the Earth. It is less dense than Earth, and the atmosphere is very thin,” he said. “The reason I’m stating these things is that, believe it or not, it has something to do with finding Martian meteorites on Earth.”
He also compared the planet to the movie “The Martian.”
“If you saw the movie, you actually saw what Arizona looks like, but it’s a pretty good analogy to the reddish sands, deserts and coherent rocks on Mars,” he said.
Berkley and Taylor declared that some rocks on the Earth actually come from Mars, and in doing so, they were the first humans to claim this. They were found to be correct after mass spectrometry work was done in the early 1980s.
Klein assigned a project for Berkley and Taylor to work on that led the two to make their miraculous discovery. “They were working on these things called nakhlites, which are rocks named after the meteorite Nakhla, and when he said he wanted us to work on nakhlites, Jeff and I said ‘What?’,” he said.
After using the process of elimination, Berkley and Taylor came to the conclusion that the nakhlite meteorites had to have come from Mars.
“Mercury is too reducing in oxygen. Venus is too large. They aren’t from Earth because they were seen coming down on Earth, and forget about gas giants,” he said. “It has got to be from Mars.”
The people who attended the panel showed up for different reasons.
Geology and environmental sciences professor Gordon Baird attended the lecture for a quick refreshment of facts he’d already known.
“I come to Sigma Xi meetings, and it’s sort of a regular thing. I’ve done it for 25 years,” he said. “I’ve known Jack for decades, and so we’ve gone over these meteorite stories a long time.”
Baird also attended to help with one of his classes.
“I’m teaching the Moons and Planets course right now, which [Berkley] used to teach, so it’s always good to see if there’s any new information coming down the pike,” he said.
Assistant professor of psychology Aaron Rodgers wanted to expand his knowledge on other subjects.
“I like learning neato things that are not in my field,” he said. “My father was a geologist, and geology is very interesting to me. Space and meteorites is, of course, interesting to everybody, so I thought it’d be cool.”
Rodgers succeeded in gaining knowledge in a field other than his own.
“One of the things I learned was that a great deal of what we knew during the ‘70s and ‘80s about the possibility of water and some other things on Mars actually came from these meteorites, and that’s what it seemed like in the presentation,” he said. “Also, it was fairly recent, at least in my life, that we actually learned that these meteorites that have been hanging around for billions of years might’ve actually come from the mantle of Mars.”