Geoff Notkin hosts the award-winning television adventure series Meteorite Men on Science Channel, currently in its third season, and has also appeared in shows for Discovery, TLC, PBS, A&E, National Geographic Channel, History Channel, Travel Channel, and the BBC. He is a science writer, meteorite specialist, photographer, world traveler, and the owner of Aerolite Meteorites LLC, an international company that provides meteorite specimens to collectors and institutions worldwide.
An accomplished author, Geoff 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, and many other national and international publications. He is the author of the books Meteorite Hunting: How To Find Treasure From Space and Rock Star: Adventures Of A Meteorite Man (April 2012), the science column Meteorwritings on Geology.com, a science and arts blog, The Logical Lizard, for TucsonCitizen.com, and The Adventurist, a column for IndieReader.com
Geoff has worked with most of the world’s major institutions including The American Museum of Natural History, New York; The Natural History Museum, London; The Center for Meteorite Studies at ASU, Tempe; and the Oscar E. Monnig Meteorite Collection. He is a member of The Explorer’s Club, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the International Meteorite Collectors’ Association, and the Association of Applied Paleontological Sciences. The minor planet 132904, discovered at Mount Palomar, was named after him in recognition of his contributions to science and education.
Adventuring has taken Geoff to forty-five countries and some of our planet’s most remote areas including Siberia, Chile’s Atacama Desert, the Australian Outback, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, rural Mexico, the Middle East, and he has three times crossed the Arctic Circle.
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, and considers Tucson his home.