Alfred Wegener

by Mott T. Greene

  Toward the end it was a race to the ship, hastened along by Thostrup’s desire to have done with it. Wegener thought they were moving too fast—faster than was good for the dogs. “It is unbelievable,” he wrote, “how exhausted the dogs are. I have to confess, that I side more with Mylius-Erichsen’s methods.… Thostrup and Koch don’t work the dogs properly—they lack ‘Dog-Sense.’”28 Wegener was brooding, as he would for some weeks, on the death of Ajorkpok, his oldest dog. After he had arrived at the ship, he had a long conversation about it with Achton Friis:

  I had one great heartbreak on this trip, when old Ajorkpok died on the way back here from Lambert’s Land. I had exchanged a better dog for him with Hagen, when we parted. He was thin, deaf and blind, and had lost every tooth in his head. And he just couldn’t make the forced march through the sound south of Mallemukfelsen. One day he broke down altogether. We stopped on his behalf and put up the tent, but there was nothing we could do: it was too late. The next day he tried vainly to follow the sled, making use of the sled track. All day long he struggled to put himself back into his old place in the span, but he just couldn’t keep up. Finally I hauled him up on the sled. But he didn’t like it there, and he always struggled to get down among the other dogs. Finally, on the third day, he died right next to me on the sled. How many miles did that dog slave in the service of men? All you can say is that for a few years he had been a good strong dog. Now he was finished, of no further use and finally freed from his exhausting service only by a wretched death in it. We buried him deep in a crevice in the sea ice at the North depot where he died.29

  On 27 May Wegener broke through the ice, and his feet were soaked through the holes in his kamiks; he spent the next three days with very cold feet, though with the temperature suddenly above freezing, his feet were merely wet—pure luck. He was so exhausted that the whip fell from his hand three different times, and consequently he was wetted through on his back and shoulder from falling off the sled: “In short a most unpleasant day.”30 But his thoughts were elsewhere, still dreaming of the South Pole and how he would travel there: “On a sled trip in South Polar regions, when you are alternating between sea ice and Inland ice this combination of Greenland sleds and skis is absolutely crucial.”31 He was sorry the trip was coming to an end; he was having a fascinating time, mishaps notwithstanding. To the end he was photographing, measuring, sampling, and dreaming: “If only my photographs of the North turn out! The first thing I do when I get back will be to develop the plates. I’ve got to use the time before Koch gets back, and Hagen and Mylius-Erichsen, all of whom will have photographs.”32

  Alfred Wegener (right) and Gustav Thostrup on 1 June 1907, the day after their return from the sixty-five-day sled trip north. From Friis, Im Grönlandeis mit Mylius-Erichsen (1910).

  Wegener and Thostrup arrived back at the ship on the last day of May, having been out for sixty-five days. They posed the next day for their official return photo—exhausted but in one piece, enjoying their first cigars. Thostrup looks slightly stunned, and one can see the rough bandage on his smashed finger. Wegener looks like he would like to smile but hasn’t the energy. As a “civilized European,” however, he has bothered to change clothes and shave.

  Summer and Fall 1907

  Wegener had now proven one of the things he had come to Greenland to prove: that he was one of the strong, not one of the weak. He not only had survived a grueling and dangerous trip but had distinguished himself. He had done good science, hunted musk ox and bear, explored the coast and the fjords, and mounted the Inland Ice. He had a part of Greenland (small, but real) named after him. It was not just any German name on the map, but his name. In the first weeks after his return, Thostrup’s stories of the trip included quiet praise of Wegener’s hardiness, cooperation, courage, and determination. Achton Friis, always working up notes for his “expedition book,” questioned Wegener closely about the trip and was delighted and moved by Wegener’s solicitude for the old dog, Ajorkpok. Alfred was not so much “Dr. Wegener” anymore as “Wegener,” a comrade. Such shifts of position and perception are common on expeditions of all kinds, as the members accumulate successes and stories of success, or the reverse. Wegener had been in the North. He was now one of the explorers, not the “German scientist.” His virtual silence on the sledge trip, largely due to his inability to converse in Danish, had been read approvingly by Thostrup as a mirror of his own taciturnity and was approved in turn by the others.

  Wegener’s exploits had won him the respect of those who had stayed behind, and he enjoyed the sense of inclusion. Yet the problem of getting his science done was still there. In spite of his training of Weinschenck and Koefoed in aerology, as well as their promises to keep the flight program going in his absence, they had made only four flights in April and but a single ascent in May, nearly undoing Wegener’s design of flights in every month of the year. There was nothing to be done about it. Koch had not yet returned, and Wegener made use of the darkroom to develop his photographic plates and store them away. He indexed and packed his geology specimens, though there were still some boxes to be recovered from the depot immediately to the north. The Danmarkshavn station party had at least kept the magnetic observatory going, and he had a continuous month of declination readings.33 He was fairly certain they would amount to nothing, but his psychic equilibrium depended mostly on whether something was being attempted, not whether something was being achieved: the activity was itself an achievement.

  Danmarkshavn in June took on a gentler aspect, and the world once again had color. The ice was going out in the outer harbor, and one could see blue water and the lovely light green of the submerged floes. Flowers were appearing everywhere—white heather, pale green saxifrage, the soft red of ice ranunculus, all in rapidly expanding carpets. Scattered across this apron of color, the scientists—in their dark shirts and broad-brimmed straw hats—looked like large children in summer camp uniforms, practicing nature study. Arner Manniche with his bird specimens, Andreas Lundager from the “Villa” with his botany, and Fritz Johansen with his microscope and jars of marine microorganisms all gave the shoreside camp a sense of studious, if incongruously juvenile, occupation.

  Over all of this activity, like guardian deities, flew Wegener’s kites and balloons. “Wegener’s work,” wrote Friis, “goes up and down, insofar as it is attached to his kites and balloons. These strange creatures float above us from morning to night, and we have grown so accustomed to them that they seem to belong to the landscape and to be characteristic of the region we occupy. The immense patience required to carry out these investigations under the adverse weather here, in all seasons of the year, can scarcely be imagined, unless you look through Wegener’s observation journal, in which he has itemized every mishap.”34

  The kites and balloons were a visible sign of Wegener’s role in the expedition and, even more, a symbol of his constancy of purpose. Friis remarked that Wegener seemed unstoppable once he had set his mind to a task. Once and only once had he ever seen Wegener give up on something. The case involved one of the dogs, a dog so averse to work and so independent that he had early in life been dubbed “Misanthrope.” Misanthrope, other than during mealtimes, spent the entire summer sunning himself in the lee of the Villa. He liked to sleep sitting up on his haunches, swaying back and forth as he dozed. As Friis tells the story, Wegener, in the course of some errand to the Villa, noticed Misanthrope in his characteristic spot and determined to get a rise out of him. He walked up to him and pulled on his muzzle. The dog never even opened his eyes. Wegener tried to knock one of his forelegs out from under him; Misanthrope calmly returned it to place. Wegener yelled into his ear: nothing. Finally, looking around, he found a feather, inserted it into the dog’s nostril, and for a minute or more twirled it delicately back and forth. A tear appeared in the dog’s eye closest to the feather, but Misanthrope never opened his eyes. Finally, after another minute, he gave a great yawn, and Wegener, defeated, gave it up as hopeless, dropped the feather, and
walked away.35

  The return to “station science” and the aerology program was a step back into something more familiar than exploring, but no less arduous and, for Wegener, hardly less interesting. In June he flew as many kites and balloons as his stamina, the weather, and the endless string of technical mishaps would allow. He managed to get something aloft about every third day. The work of winching, still exhausting, was made easier by continuous daylight and moderate temperatures—now rarely below freezing. The stark temperature contrasts with the winter (June at Danmarkshavn has a mean daily temperature 25°C [45°F] higher than February) made possible interesting comparisons of the structure of the atmosphere, particularly the way it would cool (or warm) at higher altitudes in summer. He set a goal of doubling the altitude of his kites and balloons, in spite of the additional hours of winching involved. In June he managed a mean altitude of 1,183 meters (3,881 feet) for his ten flights, twice anything achieved in the previous three months by his assistants, and got one balloon, in nearly still air, up to about 2,000 meters (6,562 feet).36

  As this work went on, the last of the expedition was still coming back from the North. Koch returned to Danmarkshavn at the end of June and announced that Mylius, from whom he had parted a month earlier, should be along in a few days. He’d have to hurry, reported Koch, as the ice was almost out at Mallemukfjeld and they had barely made it themselves. Koch’s return was good news for Wegener, who now could converse in German with someone again. Koch enlisted him immediately in geodetic work, as he was anxious about the exactitude of his longitude measurements for Danmarkshavn. He needed assurance that the geodetic part of his work in the North would stand, since his longitudes and descriptions were very different from those of Peary. Koch had made it to Navy Cliff and to Cape Morris Jessup, at the very northern tip of Greenland. In these places he had made a major discovery: the “Peary Channel,” supposed by Peary to cut across Greenland completely at the tip, was no channel at all, merely a very deep fjord that Peary had misread from afar. This was important for the expedition’s political as well as scientific aims. When Koch had told Mylius of his discovery, Mylius had been unable to let the matter rest, and instead of turning south, as conditions indicated he must, he had insisted on going north himself. Koch understood: it was not that Mylius disbelieved him; it was that Mylius could not stand the idea of a major discovery in which he had no role. He would go and “confirm it.”

  July brought warmer weather, more flowers, and millions of mosquitoes. In a Greenland summer, as in parts of Alaska, the only way there could be more mosquitoes is if some of them were smaller. Breeding 50 million to the hectare (2.5 acres), they made every outdoor activity a considerable challenge, and the residents of Danmarkshavn found themselves dreaming of the winter as they had just finished dreaming of summer, more or less proving that the one constant of a polar trip is discomfort: the source may vary, but the intensity remains the same.

  Trying for ever-greater heights in the aerology program (Wegener wanted to reach 3,000 meters [9,843 feet] that summer) meant that Koefoed and Weinschenck, the engineers, had to share additional hours of winching the kites and balloons up and down. They worked like galley slaves—six and seven hours of winch work in a day. Wegener had found that anything much above 1,500 meters (4,921 feet) was so exhausting that it wasn’t worth the effort, but still he lacked data above a kilometer or so, and this worried him considerably.37 On 10 July he had witnessed and photographed the evolution of three very large waterspouts reaching from the stratocumulus layer above the station to the surface of the sea—and a kite at 3,000 meters could have provided material of real scientific interest, as little was known about the formation of these Wasserhosen.38

  Wegener’s winch motor had never arrived, or had been left in Iceland—no one knew which. But one piece of equipment that had made it to Greenland was the expedition’s automobile. A fragile-looking buggy, steered with a joystick and with the engine mounted behind the rider (a true and early horseless carriage), the automobile was to have been a minor featured “story” for the expedition—the “first mechanical overland travel in Greenland.” The automobile was indeed a marvel, but it had not actually been anywhere or done anything significant until the engineers and Wegener dismounted one of the rear wheels and slipped a drive belt over the rear axle, thereby using it to power the kite winch. The drive belt had been manufactured aboard the ship (and the wooden chassis fashioned) by Harald Hagerup (1877–1947), whose skill as a leather worker had already proven itself in the form of the durable footwear he had cobbled from walrus hides. The automobile winch worked like magic, and with it they managed thirteen ascents in July and, by early August, a record altitude for a kite of 3,110 meters (10,203 feet).39

  August marked the first anniversary of the expedition’s arrival in Greenland, but all the fireworks were provided by the weather. Early in the morning of 1 August, without warning, Danmarkshavn was hit by a violent windstorm from the north, which tore the ship’s anchors from the shore and set the Danmark adrift. The wind blew the ship out against the ice margin, crushing the two ship’s boats tethered to the lee side. Everything not battened down (and that was almost everything) was blown about on the ship and on the shore, including two of Wegener’s better kites and the kite-house—they were completely destroyed.

  The storm was unlike anything Wegener had ever seen, including the cloud forms—great cloud rolls stretching from east to west, from the sea all the way to the distant Inland Ice, gray-blue and red-brown, laden with dust, and tearing and reforming, only a few hundred meters above their heads, hour after hour. The surface wind would die down to a flat calm and then suddenly gust to 30–35 meters per second (70–80 miles per hour), as the clouds continued to roll and billow overhead. It was their first experience of the Piteraq, the sudden and ferocious winds of East Greenland that blow downslope from the Inland Ice. The phenomenon is known in Europe and elsewhere (as in the case of the fjord winds of Norway), but only in Greenland and Antarctica do these winds blow with such force and on such an immense scale.

  The weather of the next few days provided exciting confirmation of character of the phenomenon. On 3 August Wegener’s meteorograph record from the kite at altitude of 3,110 meters confirmed relatively warm air aloft, with adiabatic cooling of only half the normal value and a temp of only −8°C (17°F) at the maximum altitude, where normally he would have expected about −25°C (−13°F). That day and the next the sky was covered with the serrated ranks of stratocumulus clouds, row after row of cotton puffs. To the south, above Koldeway Island, were large “Mushroom-cap clouds” (Pilzhüten) with flat bottoms—the sort that form in the lee of a mountain or other obstruction that produces a “standing wave” in the air flowing over it. All this was evidence of a sharp inversion and strong layering.

  Wegener launching a captive balloon in August 1907. He is standing just to the left of the balloon cable tethered to the winch, and he is rigging the meteorograph. Note the expedition’s automobile, with a drive belt around the axle to power the winch. From Friis, Im Grönlandeis mit Mylius-Erichsen.

  This was the most interesting scientific problem Wegener had yet encountered in Greenland, and it provided an avenue to employ his theoretical training with his practical skills. The phenomenon of the föhn wind, the warm downslope winds common to mountainous areas in all parts of the world, was a preoccupation of his teacher at Berlin, von Bezold. The particularly violent föhn of Greenland had been described by the Danish glaciologist Hinrich Rink (1819–1893) in 1862; Rink, however, had to be content with visual observation and ground-station temperatures. What Wegener had seen in August clearly matched the outlines of Rink’s description of the phenomenon, though Rink’s explanation—of a warm wind blowing across Greenland from east to west—was ruled out by Wegener’s knowledge of the prevailing upper-level winds and by the experience of the föhn at Kap Bismarck, which had blown in the opposite direction from the north and from the west: it was clearly a downslope wind, an “ai
r avalanche.” Wegener saw that a series of careful observations, made simultaneously inland and at the coast, could provide the materials for a definitive description and open the way for a complete physical analysis of an outstanding meteorological question.

  With Mylius-Erichsen still gone in the North and unlikely to return now until the sea froze over, Capt. Alf Trolle found himself in command of a difficult situation. Without Mylius’s strong direction, the expedition was beginning to come apart. The democratic mixing of crew and scientists, a feature of the story Mylius had planned from the start, was the first casualty. Lunchtime aboard ship, which required two sittings, quickly broke into a crew lunch and a scientist lunch. While the latter were in good spirits and discussed their work over their food, the crew’s conversation at midday was descending into squabbles and tittle-tattle—or, as Wegener dubbed it, Klatsch.40

  Wegener’s suggestion to Trolle that they begin immediately to construct and staff (over the winter) a second weather station inland was therefore both welcome and opportune. Trolle agreed almost immediately. The transport of materials and construction of such a station would require a substantial expedition, and its provisioning and fueling would require continuous activity through the winter. The ship’s crew would thus be occupied through the autumn at least. The proposed location was the deep recesses of Mørke Fjord, some 70 kilometers (43 miles) to the west, in an area reconnoitered the previous autumn by Mylius himself. The halfway point was the Hvalrosødden, where they had hunted walrus the previous summer and to which the crew all knew the way.