Harold Urey
The Nobel prize-winning chemist who helped found cosmochemistry, the study of the chemistry of the Solar System.
Key facts
- Born
- 1893
- Died
- 1981
- Nationality
- American
- Field
- Chemist
Harold Clayton Urey won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1934 for discovering deuterium, the heavy form of hydrogen. During the Second World War he worked on separating uranium isotopes for the atomic bomb, and afterwards he turned to the Earth and the planets.
At the University of Chicago, Urey showed how the ratio of oxygen isotopes in sea shells records the temperature of ancient oceans, founding a new way to study past climate. He then asked how the planets themselves had formed, and realised that meteorites held the answer. His 1952 book The Planets made the chemistry of the Solar System a serious field of research.
In 1956, with Hans Suess, he published a table of how common each element and isotope is in the Solar System, drawn largely from analyses of meteorites. In 1953 his student Stanley Miller passed sparks through a mixture of gases and made amino acids, an experiment that inspired the later search for those molecules in meteorites such as Murchison.
Urey was also a strong supporter of exploring the Moon, arguing that lunar rocks would preserve the early history of the Solar System, and he studied Apollo samples in his last years. Craters on the Moon and Mars, and an asteroid, are named after him.