2007 Service Award for John Schutt

Abstract

It is an honor to introduce (albeit 17 years late) the recipient of the Meteoritical Society's 2007 Service Award, Dr. John Schutt. I have had the great privilege of working with John, or “Johnny Alpine” as he has often been called, for almost 40 years. After all that time, I have an endless supply of anecdotes I could share, but a great number of you reading this have your own, so I will restrain myself. Suffice it to say that my first meeting with John was when the late Bill Cassidy (founder of the US Antarctic Search for Meteorites program, or ANSMET) sent me to his dorm room in McMurdo, where I found a sweating, smelly, heaving John deep in the grasp of that marvelous contagion we call “the McMurdo Crud.” Ever the gentleman, he coughed into his hands for 15–20 seconds, then with a very crooked grin offered me his hand in friendship. Things have gone uphill ever since.

As is standard fare for these awards, many of you either know John or have at least heard of him. What is different this time is a matter of intensity—many of us have literally, at one moment or another, trusted John with our lives. No offense, Barringer and Leonard and Nier Awards, but Johnny Alpine is someone who deserves respect on an entirely different level.

So what are John's accomplishments? Let us start with meteoritics. John was the first dedicated mountaineer to work with the US Antarctic Search for Meteorites program, starting in 1980 and continuing to this day. That puts him at well-over 40 field seasons years and counting, of involvement with ANSMET. He has spent at least 5 full years of his life camping out on the East Antarctic ice sheet. The result is that John can probably claim to be the world's premier meteorite recovery specialist, having recovered more meteorites than any single person in history. ANSMET does not keep track of who found individual specimens in any given season, but making reasonable estimates, I'd put the number for John somewhere around 4000 or 5000. For perspective, this is about two times the cumulative number of known meteorites found before systematic Antarctic collection began. Similarly, I think no individual in history has personally recovered more samples of Mars; in some sense, he is to Mars what the Apollo astronauts were to the Moon. And perhaps the most astonishing feature of this body of work is that every single sample has been made available to the world's science community free of charge, and curated at the highest level, with neither John nor any other ANSMET personnel getting favored access to the specimens.

In addition to his work as ANSMET's mountaineer he has contributed tens of thousands of hours beyond those “normal” duties. John single-handedly dragged ANSMET into mapping find locations, ultimately created AMLAMP (Antarctic Meteorite Location and Mapping Program), which preserves and makes available the geographical information related to Antarctic meteorite finds. This was done originally without funding; for over two decades, John simply donated his time and efforts. Similarly John spent hundreds of hours digitizing a huge proportion of the US aerial photography catalog, so that ANSMET reconnaissance efforts would be easier to support.

The activities and contributions do not end with ANSMET. Since the mid-90s, John has been spent many of his OTHER summers as the camp manager for the Haughton/Mars project on Devon Island, making him truly bipolar. John has participated in meteorite searches in the deserts of the American southwest and in Greenland, built komatik sleds for the US Antarctic Program, and prospected for economic minerals in Alaska, across the western United States, Mexico, and Sudan. He helped develop techniques for drilling in ridiculously difficult conditions (think drilling horizontally into a mountain while hanging off a cliff), managed a floating ice island in the Arctic Ocean, summited Makalu without supplemental oxygen (the fifth highest mountain in the world and one of the most difficult to climb), traversed the Patagonian icecap on skis and done it all with a calm, capable demeanor that redefines the meaning of “chill.”

Please join me in recognizing the incredible contributions John has made to our society. I encourage all of you to get to know John yourselves and thank him for this tremendous body of work.