Sir

In a review of Freeman Dyson's book, The Sun, the Genome and the Internet, Tools of Scientific Revolutions, the reviewer writes of “such extravagances as bringing back lumps of rock from Mars, when nature has already left us generous supplies of the same material in the form of meteorites, mostly still reposing in the Arctic ice” (Nature 398, 770; 1999). I assume he is in fact referring to the Antarctic blue ice meteorite recovery areas such as Lewis Cliff, Antarctica.

It could be possible to recover more than 100,000 meteorites in the Antarctic over the next couple of decades. In 1986-87, for example, we recovered several hundred meteorites.