Geoff Notkin, author of They Came From Outer Space, co-hosts the award-winning television series Meteorite Men on Science Channel, which will be back for a third season late in 2011. He is a science writer, meteorite specialist, photographer, adventurer, and the owner of Aerolite Meteorites LLC, an international company that provides meteorite specimens to collectors and institutions worldwide.
Geoff’s new book, Meteorite Hunting: How To Find Treasure From Space, a how-to guide that covers finding, excavating and identifying rocks from space, was published on February 1, 2011. It is available at www.meteoritehunters.tv. The book also includes behind the scene pictures from Season One and Season Two of Meteorite Men. He has written more than 100 published articles on meteoritics, paleontology, astronomy, adventure travel, history, and the arts, with his work appearing in Astronomy, Sky & Telescope, Wired, Reader’s Digest, The Village Voice, Seed, Rock & Gem, Geotimes, Meteorite, The Field Guide to Meteors and Meteorites, Meteorite Hunting & Collecting Magazine, New York Press, Tucson Citizen, Meteoryt (Poland), Mushroom (Germany), TIMA (Japan), American Theater Arts, Mechanical Engineering, and many other national and international publications. He is the author of Meteorwritings, a science column on Geology.com, and writes a science and arts blog, The Logical Lizard, for The Voice of Tucson on TucsonCitizen.com
Geoff has worked with most of the world’s major meteorite institutions including The Natural History Museum, London; The Institute of Meteoritics at UNM, Albuquerque; The Center for Meteorite Studies at ASU, Tempe; and the Oscar E. Monnig Meteorite Gallery at TCU, Fort Worth. He is a member of The Explorer’s Club, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the International Meteorite Collectors’ Association, the Association of Applied Paleontological Sciences, and the Society of Southwestern Authors.
Meteorite hunting has taken Geoff to forty-five countries and some of our planet’s most remote locations in search of elusive and valuable space rocks, including Chile’s Atacama Desert, the Australian Outback, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, rural Mexico, the Middle East, and across the Arctic Circle in northern Siberia onboard an ex-military Russian helicopter.
Fascinated by meteorites since he was a little boy, by the age of seven Geoff was already an avid rock hound and fossil collector. His father is an amateur astronomer and shared his love of stargazing. “I was stunned that you could actually see other worlds from a suburban London garden,” Geoff states: “I suppose the epiphany came when my mother took me to visit London’s Geological Museum. I was awed by the Hall of Meteorites and in a moment of revelation realized that studying and collecting meteorites would be a unique combination of geology and astronomy … I have been hooked ever since.”
Geoff was born on 14th street in Manhattan and grew up in London, England. He studied geology, astronomy, photography, writing, and design in London, Boston and New York, now resides in the Sonoran Desert of southern Arizona, with one eccentric cat, no children, and a flock of semi-tame quail. The minor planet 132904, discovered at Mount Palomar, was named after him in recongnition of his contributions to science and education.
