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Geochemist who deciphered chemical signatures in the modern and ancient oceans.
Henry 'Harry' Elderfield showed how the distributions of chemicals in seawater and sediments can reveal the ocean's role in historical climate change.
Elderfield, who died on 19 April, was born in 1943, at the height of the Second World War, in North Yorkshire, UK. A few days before his birth, his father, Henry, was reported missing in action, presumed drowned, a loss that may have contributed to Elderfield's draw to the oceans as well as to the past. After obtaining a degree in chemistry from the University of Liverpool, UK, in 1965, he completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Imperial College London, in 1969, and started a lectureship at the University of Leeds, UK, even before completing his PhD.
In 1977, Elderfield headed to the University of Rhode Island in Kingston for a sabbatical year. There he met geochemists Gary Klinkhammer, John Edmond and Wallace Broecker. Discussions with these scientists would have a major influence on the research questions that he later pursued.
Back at Leeds, Elderfield's laboratory technician, Mervyn Greaves, was told to make himself useful in the lab of another faculty member, Chris Hawkesworth. Hawkesworth had established a way to analyse rare-earth metals - a group of 17 elements - in 1-gram rock samples. Elderfield's biggest scientific splash came when he and Greaves applied a modified version of this method to 50-litre samples of seawater and made the first measurements of the tiny concentrations of...