March 5, 2001 Sp70 Contact: Sarah Maxwell Director of Media Relations 507.646.4183 Carleton College Donates Two Collections of Antarctic Rocks Northfield, Minn. — The geology department at Carleton College recently donated two collections of Antarctic rocks to The Ohio State University’s Byrd Polar Research Center, which is developing an Antarctic Rock Repository to house sample collections from Antarctica obtained by earth scientists through 40 years of fieldwork. The rocks Carleton donated were studied by Duncan Stewart, a professor of geology at Carleton from 1933 to 1970 who was regarded as a foremost authority on Antarctic petrology. During his career, he studied rock collections from Admiral Richard Byrd’s expeditions, as well as those of other Antarctic explorers. The first collection of rocks was a gift to Carleton from The Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia and was among the first scientific specimens collected in Antarctica, during the 1907-09 British Antarctic Expedition. The mostly igneous rocks came from Cape Royds, a promontory on the west side of Mount Erebus, Ross Island, Antarctica. The second collection is 12,451 granules, pebbles, cobbles, boulders and angular blocks from Operation Deep Freeze IV, part of a multinational exploration of Antarctica from 1957 to 1968. According to an article written by Stewart, this group of rocks "offers excellent clues as to the nature of the rocks of [Antarctica] and its islands from which they were derived, outcrops of which may never be seen because of ice cover." Since Stewart’s retirement, the rocks have been held in storage at Carleton and have outlived their usefulness for the College, according to Tim Vick, technical director in geology. On behalf of the geology department, he arranged the donation to the Byrd Center, where as part of the Antarctic Rock Repository, the rock collections would be catalogued and curated and made accessible to earth scientists and the general public for educational purposes. # # # #