Harmon Craig

Harmon Craig (March 15, 1926 – March 14, 2003) was an American geochemist who worked briefly for the University of Chicago (1951-1955) before spending the majority of his career at Scripps Institution of Oceanography (1955-2003).

Craig was involved in numerous research expeditions, which visited the Great Rift Valley of East Africa, the crater of Loihi (now known as Kamaʻehuakanaloa), the Afar Depression of Ethiopia, Greenland's ice cores, and Yellowstone's geysers, among many others. This led to him being described as "the Indiana Jones of the Earth sciences", someone "whose overriding impulse was to get out and see the world they were studying".

Craig made many significant discoveries in geochemistry. He is credited with establishing the field of carbon isotope geochemistry by characterizing carbon's stable isotopic signatures in various natural materials. This had immediate applications in radiocarbon dating. By studying stable and radioactive carbon isotopes in the biosphere and air-sea system, he derived the atmospheric residence time of carbon dioxide with respect to oceanic uptake. His work laid the foundation for isotopic studies of the carbon cycle, and was fundamental to understanding carbon sequestering in the oceanic and the terrestrial biosphere and the modulation of global warming. In addition, from 1969 to 1989, Harmon Craig served as an editor for ''Earth and Planetary Science Letters''. Provided by Wikipedia