Hans Suess

• 1. Introduction

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  During the Second World War, a chemist named Hans Suess advised the production of heavy water at a plant in Norway. Allied commandos would later target that exact facility in Operation Gunnerside. Suess was born on the 16th of December 1909, an Austrian-born physical chemist and nuclear physicist who later became an American citizen. He inherited more than a career in science: his grandfather was the Austrian geologist Eduard Suess. What turned a wartime nuclear advisor into a scientist whose name would come to mark a change in the air itself?

• 2. A Physicist's Foundations

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  Philipp Gross supervised Hans Suess's doctorate in chemistry at the University of Vienna, completed in 1935. That degree gave him a foundation for a different kind of collaboration once the war ended. Suess worked with Hans Jensen on the shell model of the atomic nucleus, a framework describing how protons and neutrons are arranged inside the nucleus. Jensen would go on to win a Nobel Prize in 1963. In 1950, Suess emigrated to the United States, moving from nuclear theory into an entirely new field of research.

• 3. Cosmochemistry In Chicago

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  Harold Urey had already won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1934 when Suess joined him at the University of Chicago. Together they investigated the abundance of certain elements in meteorites, a field known as cosmochemistry. In 1955, Suess left Chicago for a faculty position at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. The move pointed his research toward the ocean rather than outer space.

• 4. Founding UCSD

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  In 1958, Suess became one of four founding faculty members of the University of California, San Diego. He remained a professor there until 1977, then continued afterward as emeritus professor. At UCSD, Suess built a laboratory dedicated to carbon-14 determinations. Among the students he trained there was Ellen R. M. Druffel. She later became the Fred Kavli Professor of Earth System Science at the University of California, Irvine. That laboratory would become the base for research that carried his name into a debate about the modern atmosphere.

• 5. The Suess Effect

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  Suess's most recent research focused on the distribution of carbon-14 and tritium across the oceans and atmosphere. Working from radiocarbon analyses of annual growth rings in trees, he helped calibrate the radiocarbon dating scale. A mineral called suessite was named after him too, an iron-nickel silicide found in enstatite chondrite meteorites, a nod to his earlier work with meteorites. But the tree rings held a second story. He used that same evidence to measure something else. He tracked how much carbon dioxide from fossil fuels, burned since the industrial revolution, was diluting the atmosphere's natural radiocarbon. That dilution is now known as the Suess effect, discussed today alongside the anthropogenic greenhouse effect. It remains the clearest reason his research is still cited in studies of the modern atmosphere.

• 6. A Case Of Mistaken Identity

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  On the 20th of September 1993, Suess died in a La Jolla retirement home. The US Postal Service, among others, frequently confused his mail with letters addressed to Dr. Seuss. Seuss, born Theodor Seuss Geisel, was the children's author who also lived in La Jolla, California. The mix-up outlived them both. Suess's personal papers and Geisel's are now both housed in the Geisel Library at the University of California, San Diego. The building holds two very different careers under one shared name.