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Harry McSween

American geologist

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General referenceInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionSep 1, 2026
Entity authorityQ5662858 ↗
Source-derived summary

Harry "Hap" Younger McSween Jr. is Chancellor's Professor Emeritus of Planetary Geoscience at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. He has published papers and popular books about meteorites and planetary exploration, and textbooks on geochemistry and cosmochemistry.

Biography

McSween was born September 29, 1945, in Charlotte, North Carolina. After finishing school he attended The Citadel, where he graduated with a B.S. in chemistry in 1967. He then pursued an M.S. in geology at the University of Georgia, where he graduated in 1969. The title of his thesis was "Petrological and geochemical studies in the Coronaca area, Greenwood County, South Carolina". He then joined the Air Force where he was a pilot flying C-141 aircraft around the world.

After his military service he went on to Harvard, where he became John A. Wood's first graduate student. It was here that Edward Stolper and he came up with the idea that some meteorites might originate from Mars.

Editorial summary

This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Harry McSween” as american geologist. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.

Editorial reviewA practical starting point whose main value is the path it opens into stronger specialist and primary sources. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1945, 1967, 1969—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 1945-09-29. The account is most persuasive where Harry, McSween and American can be independently traced.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as american geologist. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.

Evidence profile

The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 1, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5662858. VIAF identifies the subject as 93796550. The Library of Congress control number is n86110425. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1945, 1967 and 1969.

Critical limits

Overview language is designed for orientation and should not be treated as a substitute for the evidence cited beneath it. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Harry McSween” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.