Grenville Turner FRS (1 November 1936 – 22 August 2024) was a British geochemist who was a research professor at the University of Manchester.
His argon-dating technique involved stepped pyrolysis of the rocks to force out the argon, then determining the isotopic ratios in the gas by mass spectrometry.
These techniques have been invaluable to cosmochemists and geochemists, and have been applied (by Turner and others) to determine the geochronology of diamonds and inclusions in them, and the precise ages of mantle and crustal rocks from the Earth.
Turner set up the first ion microprobe in the United Kingdom intended for use primarily for examining extraterrestrial material.
His results cast light on the environment in which the carbonate grains and so-called microfossils in that meteorite formed.