Hans Suess

Hans Eduard Suess was an Austrian-born American physical chemist and nuclear physicist, born on 16 December 1909 and a grandson of the geologist Eduard Suess. He took his doctorate in chemistry at the University of Vienna in 1935, was part of a German team studying nuclear power during the Second World War and advised on heavy water production at a Norwegian plant, and afterwards collaborated with Hans Jensen on the shell model of the atomic nucleus. He emigrated to the United States in 1950 and studied the abundance of elements in meteorites with Harold Urey at the University of Chicago. In 1955 he joined the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, and in 1958 he became one of four founding faculty members of the University of California, San Diego, where he set up a carbon-14 laboratory. Radiocarbon analyses of tree rings let him help calibrate the radiocarbon dating scale and measure the dilution of atmospheric radiocarbon by fossil fuel carbon dioxide, known as the Suess effect. The mineral suessite is named after him. He died in La Jolla on 20 September 1993.