On February 15, 2013, residents of the Russian city of Chelyabinsk were rocked by an early-morning explosion that shattered windows, damaged buildings and injured more than 1,400 people.

What caused all that havoc was a meteor – an asteroid, or at least a piece of one. It was a pretty big meteor, too – roughly the size of a five-story building. It didn’t actually strike the Earth, which would have made it a meteorite. It was kind of a glancing blow, so it exploded in the atmosphere, about 18 miles up; it was the shock wave from that air burst that blew people off their feet and knocked out windows and walls. The force was more than 26 times the energy of the atomic bomb that the U.S. dropped on Hiroshima in World War II.

While events that destructive are rare, lesser meteorite impacts are fairly common. Experts say they happen five to 10 times a year. It’s just that they’re usually in uninhabited areas, where they don’t cause damage and might not even be seen.

Finding those meteorites would be pretty important, for several reasons. For one thing, they’re the leftovers of the raw material that formed the planets in our solar system billions of years ago, so they hold valuable clues to our early cosmic history. For another, if we ever need to divert a really big asteroid headed toward Earth, like the one that helped wipe out most of the dinosaurs 66 million years ago, we’d better know a lot more about their basic properties.

But where can we find meteorites so that scientists can study them? Our guest on today’s show will tell us.

Since 1991, planetary geologist Dr. Ralph Harvey has led annual expeditions to the Antarctic ice sheets – the best meteorite-hunting location on Earth, and one of its most extreme environments. It’s not that more meteorites land there than anywhere else; it’s just that they stand out so vividly amongst all that white. And as Dr. Harvey will explain, there are forces that concentrate the meteorites in some spots, if you know where to look.

Our conversation covers a lot of ground, from what it’s like to work in one of the most hostile places on the planet, to what secrets these space rocks may hold, and the amazing technology that’s helping provide insights.

Dr. Harvey is a professor in Case Western Reserve University’s Department of Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences. He is the co-principal investigator of the U.S. Antarctic Search for Meteorites program, which in its 42-year history has recovered more than 22,000 specimens for study by scientists around the world. Dr. Harvey’s research focuses on the geochemistry of planetary materials, including the geological history of Mars, various physical properties of asteroids and meteorites, and interactions between the crust and atmosphere of Venus.