Up for auction a RARE! "Physical Chemist" Hans Suess Hand Signed First Day Cover Dated 1963.
ES-4084
Hans Eduard Suess (December
16, 1909 – September 20, 1993) was an Austrian born American physical chemist and nuclear physicist. He was a grandson of the Austrian
geologist Eduard Suess. Suess earned
his Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of Vienna in
1935 under the supervision of Philipp Gross. During World War II, he was part of a team of German scientists studying nuclear power and was advisor to the production of heavy water in a Norwegian plant (see Operation Gunnerside). After
the war, he collaborated on the shell model of
the atomic nucleus with
future (1963) Nobel Prize winner Hans Jensen. In
1950, Suess emigrated to the United States. He did research in the field of cosmochemistry, investigating the abundance of
certain elements in meteorites with Harold Urey (Nobel Prize in Chemistry,
1934) at the University of Chicago. In
1955, Suess was recruited for the faculty of Scripps
Institution of Oceanography, and in 1958 he became one of the four
founding faculty members of the University
of California, San Diego. He remained at UCSD as Professor until
1977 and as Emeritus Professor thereafter. He established a laboratory at
UCSD for carbon-14 determinations, where he
trained students including Ellen R.M. Druffel, now
the Fred Kavli Professor of Earth System Science at University of California,
Irvine. Suess's most recent
research was focused on the distribution of carbon-14 and tritium in the oceans and atmosphere. On basis of radiocarbon analyses of annual growth-rings of trees he
contributed to
·
the
calibration of the radiocarbon dating scale,
and
·
the
study of the magnitude of the dilution of atmospheric radiocarbon by carbon
dioxide from fossil fuels burned since the industrial revolution. This dilution
is known as the Suess effect (see
articles about the anthropogenic greenhouse effect).
The mineral suessite, a Fe, Ni-silicide in Enstatit-Chondrites, is named after him.