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Award of the V. M. Goldschmidt and F. W. Clarke medals of the geochemical society
Geochimicaet CosmochimicaActs, 1975, Vol. 39, pp. 7f37to 772. Pergamon Press. Printed in Northern Ireland
Award of the V. M. Goldschmidt and F. W. Clarke Medals of the Geochemical Society November 20th, 1974, Miami Beach, Florida The President-Elect of the Geochemical Society, Professor George Wetherill, University of California, Los Angeles, acting as Chairman, called upon President C. m7ayne Burnham to present the awards to the medallists. The speeches of Introduction and Acceptance follow:
Introduction
of Hans E. Suess for the
V. M. Goldschmidt Medal of the Geochemical Society by EDWARD
ANDERS
*
Mr. President, members of the Geochemical Society, and guests: Harold Urey had originally intended to introduce our distinguished medalist’, Hans Suess. Unfortunately he had to decline for reasons of health. Nobody can fill Urey’s shoes, but I shall try to do so, at least in this limited capacity. Hans Suess received his Ph.D. in physical chemistry from the University of Vienna in 1935. It was only 3 years later that he saw the light and wrote his first “Comments on the Photochemistry of the Earth’s Atmospaper on geochemistry: Formation of Organic phere: On the Origin of Free Oxygen and the Photochemical He has remained addicted to geochemistry ever since, judging from the Matter”. more t,han 100 papers that followed. Suess’ best-known contribution is his classic 1956 paper with Harold Urey: It is probably the most influential and the most “Abundances of the Elements”. Actually, it represents the climax of widely quoted paper in cosmochemistry. a lo-year effort, which began in 1946 when Suess first tried to understand V. M. Goldschmidt’s cosmic abundance table, based on meteorites. He realized that some very important clues to the origin of the elements were hidden in these data, but were obscured by analytical errors or by chemical fractionations during the formation of meteorites. He therefore recalculated Goldschmidt’s abundances for individual isotopes, in the hope that the isotopic ratios would help him recognize the basic trends even where the elemental abundances were in error. Indeed, the curve for individual isotopes showed a reasonably smooth trend, with only a few irregularities. Suess boldly predicted that these irregularities would go away when better analyses, on more primitive meteorites, became available, and this is exactly what happened. Suess’ revised abundance curve turned out to be one of the most fruitful ideas in our field. It also brought about major advances in other branches of science, such as nuclear physics, astrophysics, and planetary science: the nuclear shell model, element synthesis in stars, and condensation processes in the solar nebula. Let me briefly mention some of these. * University
of Chicago,
Chicago,
IL 60637, U.S.A. 767
768
Award of the V. M. Goldschmidt and F. W. Clarke Medals
One striking trend plainly visible in Suess’ original 1947 curve was the high abundance of nuclei with certain ‘magic’ numbers of neutrons or protons: 20, 26, 50, 82, and 126. This clue, first recognized by Suess, Haxel, and Jensen, led Hans Jensen and Maria Mayer to propose the shell model of the nucleus, for which they later received the Nobel Prize. Suess’ 1956 paper with Urey brought about a renaissance in the field of nuclear astrophysics. Their abundance curve had enough structural detail to make it possible to identify the specific nuclear processes involved, and so stellar nucleosynthesis became an active and respectable field of research. The touchstone of any model in this field still is its ability to reproduce the cosmic abundance curve. Finally, the Suess-Urey curve has stimulated a lot of work in geochemistry and cosmochemistry. It has inspired literally hundreds of experimental abundance measurements in meteorites. The cosmic abundance curve has become the basic frame of reference for interpreting the composition of meteorites, planets, and the Moon, and for reconstructing the chemical history of the early solar system. A second area in which Suess has made major contributions is the origin of noble gases in the Earth’s atmosphere and in meteorites. His 1949 paper in the Journal of Geology is a much-quoted classic, despite the fact that it was written in German. He also helped unravel the complex story of noble gases in meteorites, by showing, with Signer and Wanke in 1963-64, that there were at least two kinds of gas: ‘planetary’ and ‘solar’. Suess’ third major area of research has been carbon-14 dating. He established the world’s second Cl4 laboratory, after Libby’s, at the U.S. Geological Survey. There he determined the broad chronology of the Wisconsin ice age in North America, and discovered the ‘Suess effect’, the depression of 04 in the 20th century due to man’s industrial activities. He also provided the basic measurements of Cl4 and H3 in the major atmospheric and oceanic reservoirs, which made it possible to calculate the exchange times of these reservoirs. More recently, Suess has been the leader in efforts to establish an absolute Cl4 chronology, by comparing the apparent Cl4 age of bristlecone pine samples with their absolute ages from tree-ring counts. This work has thrown Old World archeology into a turmoil. Several Central and Northern European sites turned out to be substantially older than culturally equivalent Mediterranean and Near Eastern sites. This contradicts the established dogma of cultural diffusion from South to North, and has stirred up a lively debate, rich with invective. No introduction of Hans Suess would be complete without reference to his special brand of humor. I first encountered it at our very first meeting, at the Gordon Research Conference on Inorganic Chemistry in 1954. Suess gave a long, sober, and very low-keyed talk on his Cl4 work. The first warning that there lurked an imp behind the fapade of academic dullness came when Suess replied to a question whether the acetylene he used as a counting gas didn’t explode: “No, everything else explodes in our lab, but not acetylene”. Still, we were totally unprepared for the following gem, delivered in the same droning voice, and with the same deadpan expression: “There was a Neanderthalian jawbone, belonging to a young female about 20 to 25 years old. And I thought it would be most interesting to date this female.”
i(j8
Award of the V. M. Goldschmidt and F. W. Clarke Medals of the Geochemical Society November 20th, 1974, Miami Beach, Florida The President-Elect of the Geochemical Society, Professor George Wetherill, University of California, Los Angeles, acting as Chairman, called upon President C. m7ayne Burnham to present the awards to the medallists. The speeches of Introduction and Acceptance follow:
Introduction
of Hans E. Suess for the
V. M. Goldschmidt Medal of the Geochemical Society by EDWARD
ANDERS
*
Mr. President, members of the Geochemical Society, and guests: Harold Urey had originally intended to introduce our distinguished medalist’, Hans Suess. Unfortunately he had to decline for reasons of health. Nobody can fill Urey’s shoes, but I shall try to do so, at least in this limited capacity. Hans Suess received his Ph.D. in physical chemistry from the University of Vienna in 1935. It was only 3 years later that he saw the light and wrote his first “Comments on the Photochemistry of the Earth’s Atmospaper on geochemistry: Formation of Organic phere: On the Origin of Free Oxygen and the Photochemical He has remained addicted to geochemistry ever since, judging from the Matter”. more t,han 100 papers that followed. Suess’ best-known contribution is his classic 1956 paper with Harold Urey: It is probably the most influential and the most “Abundances of the Elements”. Actually, it represents the climax of widely quoted paper in cosmochemistry. a lo-year effort, which began in 1946 when Suess first tried to understand V. M. Goldschmidt’s cosmic abundance table, based on meteorites. He realized that some very important clues to the origin of the elements were hidden in these data, but were obscured by analytical errors or by chemical fractionations during the formation of meteorites. He therefore recalculated Goldschmidt’s abundances for individual isotopes, in the hope that the isotopic ratios would help him recognize the basic trends even where the elemental abundances were in error. Indeed, the curve for individual isotopes showed a reasonably smooth trend, with only a few irregularities. Suess boldly predicted that these irregularities would go away when better analyses, on more primitive meteorites, became available, and this is exactly what happened. Suess’ revised abundance curve turned out to be one of the most fruitful ideas in our field. It also brought about major advances in other branches of science, such as nuclear physics, astrophysics, and planetary science: the nuclear shell model, element synthesis in stars, and condensation processes in the solar nebula. Let me briefly mention some of these. * University
of Chicago,
Chicago,
IL 60637, U.S.A. 767
768
Award of the V. M. Goldschmidt and F. W. Clarke Medals
One striking trend plainly visible in Suess’ original 1947 curve was the high abundance of nuclei with certain ‘magic’ numbers of neutrons or protons: 20, 26, 50, 82, and 126. This clue, first recognized by Suess, Haxel, and Jensen, led Hans Jensen and Maria Mayer to propose the shell model of the nucleus, for which they later received the Nobel Prize. Suess’ 1956 paper with Urey brought about a renaissance in the field of nuclear astrophysics. Their abundance curve had enough structural detail to make it possible to identify the specific nuclear processes involved, and so stellar nucleosynthesis became an active and respectable field of research. The touchstone of any model in this field still is its ability to reproduce the cosmic abundance curve. Finally, the Suess-Urey curve has stimulated a lot of work in geochemistry and cosmochemistry. It has inspired literally hundreds of experimental abundance measurements in meteorites. The cosmic abundance curve has become the basic frame of reference for interpreting the composition of meteorites, planets, and the Moon, and for reconstructing the chemical history of the early solar system. A second area in which Suess has made major contributions is the origin of noble gases in the Earth’s atmosphere and in meteorites. His 1949 paper in the Journal of Geology is a much-quoted classic, despite the fact that it was written in German. He also helped unravel the complex story of noble gases in meteorites, by showing, with Signer and Wanke in 1963-64, that there were at least two kinds of gas: ‘planetary’ and ‘solar’. Suess’ third major area of research has been carbon-14 dating. He established the world’s second Cl4 laboratory, after Libby’s, at the U.S. Geological Survey. There he determined the broad chronology of the Wisconsin ice age in North America, and discovered the ‘Suess effect’, the depression of 04 in the 20th century due to man’s industrial activities. He also provided the basic measurements of Cl4 and H3 in the major atmospheric and oceanic reservoirs, which made it possible to calculate the exchange times of these reservoirs. More recently, Suess has been the leader in efforts to establish an absolute Cl4 chronology, by comparing the apparent Cl4 age of bristlecone pine samples with their absolute ages from tree-ring counts. This work has thrown Old World archeology into a turmoil. Several Central and Northern European sites turned out to be substantially older than culturally equivalent Mediterranean and Near Eastern sites. This contradicts the established dogma of cultural diffusion from South to North, and has stirred up a lively debate, rich with invective. No introduction of Hans Suess would be complete without reference to his special brand of humor. I first encountered it at our very first meeting, at the Gordon Research Conference on Inorganic Chemistry in 1954. Suess gave a long, sober, and very low-keyed talk on his Cl4 work. The first warning that there lurked an imp behind the fapade of academic dullness came when Suess replied to a question whether the acetylene he used as a counting gas didn’t explode: “No, everything else explodes in our lab, but not acetylene”. Still, we were totally unprepared for the following gem, delivered in the same droning voice, and with the same deadpan expression: “There was a Neanderthalian jawbone, belonging to a young female about 20 to 25 years old. And I thought it would be most interesting to date this female.”
i(j8