Samuel Epstein (geochemist)

Samuel Epstein ( born December 9, 1919 in Kobryn, Belarus, then Poland, † 17 September 2001 in Pasadena, California ) was a Canadian- American geochemist.

Epstein came as a child with his family to Winnipeg and studied geology and chemistry at the University of Manitoba with a Bachelor 's degree in 1941 and a master's degree in chemistry in 1942. It was in 1944, Carl A. Winkler at McGill University with a thesis the chemistry of explosives doctorate in chemistry. He then worked for the Canadian Atomic Energy project. In 1947 he went to the University of Chicago in the group of Harold C. Urey. There he developed with Ralph Buchsbaum, Heinz A. Lowenstam and other a method to determine the ratio of oxygen isotopes in carbonates, the temperature of the Earth's oceans ( first applied to the Cretaceous ). From 1952 he was at Caltech, where he was professor and further discussed the geochemistry of stable isotopes. He applied this not only in paleoclimatology, but also for example in the petrology, botany, the study of photosynthesis, the plant and animal physiology, the study of ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica and glaciers, in the study of lunar rocks and meteorites on. In 1990 he retired, but was more scientifically active until his death.

In 1977 he became a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and in 1997 he became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. In 1977 he received the Gold Medal of the Geochemical Society Schmidt, 1976, the Day Medal of the Geological Society of America, 1995, the Urey Medal of the European Association of Geochemistry and 1993, the Wollaston Medal. In 1980 he became an honorary doctorate from the University of Manitoba. 1978/79 he was president of the Geochemical Society.