On Thursday, Professor Dr. K. H. Wedepohl passed away after a short illness at the age of 91. He was a long-standing active member of the German Mineralogical Society (DMG) and served as its Treasurer for many years. In recognition of his outstanding service to the DMG, he was awarded Honorary Membership in 2005.
K. H. Wedepohl spent virtually his entire academic career in Göttingen, where he remained until his retirement in 1992. He is best known to many of us as the editor of the multi-volume Handbook of Geochemistry, published between 1969 and 1978. His most highly cited publication appeared even after his retirement: The Composition of the Continental Crust, published in Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta in 1995. With this landmark paper, he continued the work of Victor Moritz Goldschmidt, who established the field of geochemistry in Göttingen.
Following his retirement, he devoted himself primarily to the study of historical glass. In this field, too, he made fundamental contributions, culminating in the 2003 book Glass in the Middle Ages and Antiquity: History of a Material. During the final months of his life, he dedicated all his energy to his last project on the glass from Haithabu, the important Viking trading settlement near Schleswig that flourished between the ninth and eleventh centuries. Sadly, he did not live to see its publication.
G. Wörner (Göttingen)
