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Henry was born on October 10, 1900 in Cambridge, Massachussets, United States, the son of Henry Crosby Stetson, a lawyer active in local politics, and Eleanor Morland Gray Stetson. Until the father's death in 1907, the family was financially comfortable but lived in reduced circumstances thereafter.
After receiving the B. A. from Harvard in 1923, Stetson briefly considered a career in law or business but finally decided upon a life in science and earned the M. A. from Harvard in 1926.
Stetson worked for two scientific institutions for most of his life. At Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology, he was assistant curator of paleontology (1927 - 1934), research associate in paleontology (1934 - 1943), research fellow in oceanography (1943 - 1946), associate curator of oceanography (1946 - 1948), research oceanographer (1948 - 1955), and lecturer in geology (1950 - 1955).
Stetson's other main affiliation was with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, first as research associate (1931 - 1941) and then as marine geologist and Alexander Agassiz fellow (1941 - 1955).
During World War II he was a civilian employee of the Office of Scientific Research and Development and of the Office of Naval Research. Initially Stetson seemed inclined to specialize in paleontology.
Between 1927 and 1931 he published seven articles on fossil fish, extinct reptiles, and trilobites, based on specimens gathered in Scotland and in New Brunswick and on the collections of the Museum of Comparative Zoology. Stetson reported the anatomical structures of the animals, specified their taxonomic relationships to other fossil creatures, and used the taxonomic associations to reconstruct their place in evolutionary history. His access to superior collections allowed Stetson to correct errors of other paleontologists, who had depended on immature, fragmentary, or fewer specimens. Paralleling Stetson's work on fossils, and eventually eclipsing his paleontologic interests, was a continuing fascination with marine geology.
On boyhood summer vacations at Maine beaches, he had been intrigued by sea life and by the processes of erosion and deposition. Percy Raymond, Stetson's mentor in paleontology, encouraged his work on marine geology and was co-author of Stetson's first two papers in the field (1931, 1932).
Geologists had noted submarine canyons as early as 1863, but were hampered in studying their history until the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey undertook detailed soundings of the shelf in the 1930's.
In 1933 Francis Shepard predicted that the steep canyon walls shown in the Survey soundings should yield bedrock unblanketed by the recent sediments that covered the rest of the shelf. Stetson collected samples from the canyons off Georges Bank in 1934 and reported two Cretaceous sedimentary formations.
He found none of the theories of canyon creation (faulting, bottom currents, river erosion) satisfactory, and tentatively advanced the thesis that the canyons were cut by erosion in the shelf analogous to groundwater sapping on the faces of fault scarps on land. Each summer thereafter until World War II, Stetson cored and dredged along the Atlantic shelf and slope from Georges Bank south to Florida.
During the late 1930's and after the war, he shifted to an interpretation that the canyons were cut by slumping and mudflows. The other aspect of the continental shelf that interested Stetson was the distribution of sediments across it. His cores and dredge samples convinced him that the patterns of grain size, geochemical composition, and alternation of material were far more complex than earlier geologists had imagined.
No simple rules or single mechanism of transport, such as turbidity currents, determined what kinds of sediment appeared at a particular point on the shelf. Most of Stetson's data before 1942 came from the Atlantic shelf, although he conscientiously followed the published work on other continental margins.
In 1947 he began studies in the Gulf of Mexico to test the wider applicability of his description of the Atlantic shelf. He found enough in common between the two areas to argue that both represented an early stage in the history of continental shelves, without the faulting that had complicated the history of the California shelf.
He died aboard the research vessel Atlantis, off the coast of Chile.
Henry Crosby Stetson published a number of general articles on marine geology in addition to his technical monographs. He frequently prepared overview articles on marine geology for scientists in other specialties and published summaries of the work in his field for the larger public in magazines such as Harvard Alumni Bulletin (1940) and Scientific American (1955).
Stetson concentrated his marine research on the history and origin of the continental shelf and its slope, rather than on deep-sea environments. He concerned himself particularly with the submarine canyons that cut into the slope and the distribution of sediments across the shelf. While other marine geologists favored topographical evidence, Stetson preferred dredging and coring, the value of which had been suggested by earlier oceanographers. In collaboration with other scientists, he developed some ingenious equipment for this work.
Stetson gained many scientific friends with his shy humor and his forthright professional behavior. His colleagues and graduate students found him helpful in personal matters and a generous but judicious supporter of their scholarly projects.
He married Edith Williams Reid on October 15, 1927; they had three children.
