Samuel Epstein

Samuel Epstein was a Canadian American geochemist born December 9, 1919, in Kobryn, then part of Poland and now Belarus, who died September 17, 2001, in Pasadena, California, and who joined the faculty of the California Institute of Technology in 1952, remaining as professor and professor emeritus until his death. He developed methods for reconstructing geologic temperature records using stable isotope geochemistry, and his most significant achievement, developed with colleagues, was the carbonate water isotopic temperature scale, which enabled researchers to determine ancient ocean temperatures from precise measurements of the ratio of oxygen 18 to oxygen 16 in geological calcium carbonate samples, becoming the most widely used geochemical climate proxy for locations and times not sampled in ice core records. He received the V. M. Goldschmidt Award in 1977, was elected to the United States National Academy of Sciences in 1977, received the Wollaston Medal in 1993 and the Urey Medal of the European Association of Geochemistry in 1995, and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 1997.