WATCH ABOVE: Dr. Russ Schnell’s contributions to the field of atmospheric sciences have been internationally recognized, and his career started right here in Edmonton. Margeaux Morin has more on why the University of Alberta is Schnell one of it’s top honour.
EDMONTON – It was the mid 1960s and Russ Schnell was storm chasing in the name of science.
He and his colleagues from the University of Alberta were among the first to ever sit in the middle of a hail storm, in a special hail-proof vehicle and observe the storm’s characteristics.
Their objective – to figure out what substance ice latches onto in the formation of hail or snow.
“Obviously, vegetation,” Schnell remembers, “because out west of Red Deer and Rocky Mountain House where all the storms start, it was all vegetation in those parts back then.”
On a hunch, he took a big bag of fresh leaves and tested them for ice nuclei – but there were none.
“So then we went on a party and I forgot about them for a week,” he explained. “We came back and they were all murky, so I went and tested them.”
The decaying collection of leaves were full of ice-making bacterial nuclei that allowed ice to form around them, even in above freezing temperatures. Schnell discovered how to make it snow.
“I never commercialized any of it, so other people made their millions – not me,” he laughed.
The discovery has changed the way we see ice in the commercial sense. For example, mix a small amount of the bacteria with water, and shoot it out of a snow machine. Copious amounts of the white stuff will appear, even in three or four degree temperatures.
“It’s excellent snow. There’s not a ski hill in the world that doesn’t use it.”
Or, apply anti-ice nuclei bacteria on crops to prevent them from freezing.
“So the price of strawberries in winter have gone down because they don’t allow the little ice nucleus bacteria to sit on the walls of their plants.”
His discovery even has applications in the live tissue transplant field.
Schnell’s legacy started on ice, working his way through various academic institutions in North America. Now, the Deputy Director of the Global Monitoring Division for the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), his life’s work, is ironically finishing with a focus on global warming.
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Celebrated for his ability to communicate complex scientific concepts, he made an analogy.
“When you fly on an airplane from Edmonton to Calgary, 95 per cent of all the air is beneath you,” Schnell said, referring to just how small the atmosphere really is.
We’ve been pumping that air full of C02 and other pollutants since the Industrial Revolution.
“And where does it go? It’s got no where to go it just stays in our atmosphere,” said Schnell.
“The problem is not that we don’t understand that climate change is coming, the idea is, from a scientist’s view, convincing others that it is.”
Through all these years, his enthusiasm has stayed the same, and for that, the University of Alberta is bestowing to him one of its highest honours – an honorary doctorate degree and a place in the class of 2015.
“Somebody pays me to do this, can you believe that? I’d work for half this,” he exclaimed with a smile.
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