Harry Elderfield
"Harry" Henry Elderfield (born April 25, 1943 in North Yorkshire , † April 19, 2016 ) was a British geochemist .
Life
Harry Elderfield studied chemistry at the University of Liverpool with a bachelor's degree in 1965, was a research fellow at Imperial College London in the Faculty of Geology in 1968/69 and received his doctorate in 1970 from the University of Liverpool. From 1969 to 1982 he was a lecturer at the University of Leeds . In 1977 he was on a sabbatical year at the University of Rhode Island in Kingston and met the geochemists Gary Klinkhammer, John M. Edmond and Wallace Broecker , who had a formative influence on his research. From 1982, he was at St Catharine's College of the University of Cambridge and as Assistant Director of Research in the Department of Geosciences at the University of Cambridge. In 1989 he received a D.Sc. at Cambridge and became a reader in geochemistry. In 1999 he became professor of ocean geochemistry and paleo-geochemistry.
At the end of the 1970s, he and his laboratory technician Mervyn Greaves succeeded in detecting very small quantities (picomoles per kilogram) of rare earths in seawater. This enabled him to characterize water masses in the depths of the oceans and to establish a connection with the concentrations in the associated sediments, so that conclusions could be drawn about the ocean circulation and the climate in the past. In Cambridge he and his former student Martin Palmer developed a curve of the strontium isotopes in seawater over the last 75 million years. She showed the effects of hydrothermal springs in the ocean and of weathering processes on land. With this they established a new method of stratigraphy by dating sediments with the determination of the distribution of strontium isotopes. This also provides information on the carbon dioxide balance (since carbon dioxide is bound during weathering and released by hydrothermal sources).
Elderfield also took part in a 1985 marine expedition that found hydrothermal vents on the ocean floor in the rift valley of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge ( Black Smoker ).
During a sabbatical year at MIT, he met the paleochemist Edward Boyle and investigated the relationship between the chemistry of the shells of foraminifera and the surrounding seawater. Sometimes other elements (such as magnesium) are built into their shells instead of calcium and the ratio of the elements and isotopes gives conclusions, among other things, about the sea temperature (as well as the oxygen isotopes), but also about changes in the polar ice sheets. This made it possible to separate the shares of sea temperature and the formation and dismantling of the ice sheets in the study of different isotope and element shares of the foraminiferous shells.
He was a Fellow of the Royal Society (2001) and the American Geophysical Union and received the Prestwich Medal in 1993 , the Lyell Medal in 2003 , the Urey Award of the European Association of Geochemistry in 2007 and the VM Goldschmidt Award of the Geochemical Society in 2013 .
Fonts
- with Heinrich D. Holland : The oceans and marine geochemistry, Elsevier, Pergamon 2004
Web links
Individual evidence
- ^ PA Rona, G. Klinkhammer, TA Nelsen, JH Trefry, H. Elderfield: Black smokers, massive sulphides and vent biota at the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, Nature, Volume 321, 1986, pp. 33-37, abstract
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Elderfield, Harry |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Elderfield, Henry (real name) |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | British geochemist |
| DATE OF BIRTH | April 25, 1943 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | North Yorkshire |
| DATE OF DEATH | April 19, 2016 |