Geoff Notkin: Meteorite Man
The world expert on meteorites and presenter of award-winning adventure TV series Meteorite Men talks of his ongoing search for space rocks
When did you first develop a passion for space and meteorites?
I was mad about science from a very early age. My dad was a keen amateur astronomer who was always setting up his telescope, often fruitlessly, in Surrey, and one of my earliest memories is of my dad waking me up in the middle of the night, wrapping me in a blanket and carrying me out to the lawn to look at the Moon and Jupiter through the telescope. I had a cosmic aspect instilled into my childhood almost from the beginning, and my unconventional parents supported my growing passion.
Did you often go hunting for meteorites?
I saw meteorites for the first time at the Geological Museum in London, which is now part of the Natural History Museum, and I would love to blame it for my very unusual life. I would implore my mother to let me skip school and go there, which we did frequently, and I remember on my second visit entering a small, dark, moody area that was almost foreboding. There were these giant meteorites, and I remember thinking they had to be models because they were so big. I couldn’t believe they had real meteorites from space just sitting there on a display column. But they were all real, and that sparked a lifetime of fascination. I was always rockhounding out in the Surrey chalk quarries and going down to Dorset to look for fossils.
How did you go from that to hunting for meteorites as a way of life?
That’s where it gets complicated. Meteorites fascinated me throughout my childhood and through my teens and 20s. But I’m a musician as well. I became very involved with the punk rock scene in London in the 1970s, and then I moved to the US and played professionally for many years, so I was somewhat distracted by rock and roll. But I still always had a fascination for meteorites and astronomy, and whenever I was travelling and touring I always wanted to go to a planetarium or museum. In my early 30s, I said enough is enough: I must have a meteorite. I went, as a complete novice, out into the desert, and I was lucky enough to find one on my first adventure. I thought, “That was easy! I’m always told how rare they are and how difficult they are to find.” It took me two years to find my second, which brought me back down to Earth.
