The news of the expedition’s return and of the deaths of Mylius, Hagen, and Brønlund had created an immense sensation in Denmark. Trolle received a telegram from the expedition committee: a tug had been dispatched from Copenhagen to bring them home, and they should prepare themselves for a hero’s welcome. The poor old Danmark was leaking badly and had to be pumped day and night in the four-day voyage to Copenhagen. When they arrived, the tumultuous greeting stunned them—a crowd of many thousands, waving flags and cheering loudly, lined the Langlinie as the ship was towed past. After a formal greeting at the harbor, the expedition members, wearing their musty street clothes, were whisked away to the university for a great banquet with laudatory speeches. King Frederik VIII praised their courage, shook their hands, and decorated them one and all with the Danish Royal Order of Merit.82 Whether Wegener experienced this decoration as the insertion of the ring in the polar bear’s nose, we don’t know. He stayed on for a few days, said goodbye to Koch and Freuchen and the others, boarded the train for home with a case full of scientific results, and headed to Berlin. He had much to be proud of and much to do. He was, perhaps only for the moment, and other than Erich von Drygalski, the most famous Arctic explorer in Germany.
7
The Atmospheric Physicist (1)
BERLIN AND MARBURG, 1908–1910
I don’t know whether this is just my own idiosyncrasy, but everywhere I turn I stumble over these typical boundary surfaces … this idea seems to me to offer an extremely useful perspective.
WEGENER TO WLADIMIR KÖPPEN, 13 November 1909
Back in Berlin
Much has been written about the struggles of men to be chosen for Arctic expeditions; less well chronicled are their struggles to be released from them after they are over. Expedition contracts, eagerly sought and signed with alacrity, sometimes remain in force for years after the homecoming and may include burdensome and obstructive restrictions and obligations.
In the case of the Danmark Expedition, there were several important restrictions. At Mylius-Erichsen’s insistence, all members of the expedition had agreed to refrain, for a set term of months, from giving public lectures without the prior consent of the expedition committee. Mylius, as we have seen, was fatally obsessed with the fear that someone might make a discovery to which he could not lay claim. He had also planned to superintend, after the return, the matter of who should talk about the expedition, as well as when, where, and to whom. His aim had always been to employ the expedition to advance his own credentials as an explorer, and he had planned, as well, to retire the expedition’s debts, make his living, and raise funds for a new expedition by giving illustrated lectures featuring his own exploits and those of the others under his command. Mylius-Erichsen’s death certainly lessened the severity of the prohibition, but it did not change the contractual obligation.
In addition to the limitations on public lectures, there were also restrictions on writing about the expedition, and for the scientists these included a codicil that they should restrict their use of the Danmark Expedition’s scientific results (in print) until after these results had been worked up and published in the expedition’s proceedings. The scientific “results” of the expedition, meaning the reports of the uninterpreted but reduced and ordered data—physical, meteorological, geological, botanical, zoological, oceanographic, and archeological—were already committed to a planned series of volumes of Meddelelser om Grønland, scheduled to appear between 1908 and 1911 under the title Danmarks-Ekspeditionen til Grønlands Nordøstkyst 1906–1908. This was, incidentally, a breakneck pace for this venerable but sometimes leisurely journal, indicative of the importance Denmark accorded this scientific venture.
The reciprocal of the restriction on writing about the expedition was Wegener’s obligation to work up all the scientific material for publication before he could be released from his expedition contract. Initially this posed no problem for him, since he had no immediate plans for anything else. He had returned to Berlin and moved back in with his parents at 20 Georg Wilhelmstraße, in Halensee. He wanted to pursue his scientific work.
Catching Up
In order to pursue a scientific career, however, Wegener had to reestablish relations with his scientific colleagues, and this could not wait until his expedition responsibilities were completed. In the two years he had been out of touch, meteorology, aerology, and aeronautics had all moved fast and far, and the professional landscape had altered quite markedly. Among Wegener’s closest senior colleagues and sponsors, the ranks were now rather thin. Bezold, who had been in poor health when Wegener left, was dead. Aßmann was very supportive but was tied to his instrumental prototype work in Lindenberg, which was still—unbelievably(!)—under construction. Arthur Berson was leading a major aerological expedition in East Africa, having departed only a month before Wegener’s return.1 Wladimir Köppen was at Großborstel, the aerological station near Hamburg, and working on his climatology more than his meteorology.2
The real action in the mapping of the vertical structure of the atmosphere had, in Wegener’s absence, moved outside the borders of Germany. Teisserenc de Bort had been continually on the move: while Wegener was away, he had sent up sounding balloons from the Princesse Alice—the yacht of his patron, Prince Albert of Monaco—in Spitzbergen (1906) and the tropical Atlantic (1905–1906, 1907). During 1907 and 1908, he had done the same in land-based expeditions to Swedish Lapland. The study of continental interiors was also moving ahead: Russia had mounted aerological expeditions to Central Asia in 1907 and 1908. In maritime Asia, the Dutch had begun an aerological program in their colonies at the Batavia Observatory, under the direction of Willem van Bemmelen. In the summers of 1907 and 1908, a coordinated program of observations at sea had been the focus of the “international aerological weeks.” The mapping of the atmosphere, for which Bezold had been an advocate and prophet, was moving forward very fast. There were new, exciting, and ample data emerging on the structure of the atmosphere in both polar and equatorial latitudes up to almost 20 kilometers (12 miles).3
While Wegener had to catch up with what the most senior and well-funded scientists were doing, he had also to follow the work of his contemporaries and measure their efforts against his own. Two meteorologists of his own age, in particular, had emerged into prominence while he was gone: the Swiss scientist Alfred de Quervain (1879–1927), and his own countryman Heinrich Ficker (1881–1957). Wegener knew of de Quervain, having published an evaluation of his balloon theodolite in 1905. That instrument, with modifications, had become standard during Wegener’s absence. De Quervain had observed and published on a phenomenon Wegener had also seen in 1905 during pilot balloon ascents—a sharp discontinuity in the wind speed and direction at the boundary of the “inversion layer.” Moreover, de Quervain had, in 1908, worked out (in tandem with Hugo Hergesell) an important correction factor for the velocity of ascent of a pilot balloon—a question to which Aßmann and Hergesell had previously devoted a great deal of attention.4 Hergesell had the bright idea to release and follow balloons inside Straßburg Cathedral (with de Quervain observing with his theodolite), and he discovered that in such still air, balloons rose 0.5 meters per second (1 mile per hour) slower than outdoors. This indicated that the actual rate of ascent outdoors was some combination of air-pressure lifting and turbulence pushing the balloon.5 This was a very substantial correction: almost 50 percent in the first kilometer above the surface—that part of the atmosphere on which Wegener had done most of his own work. It was easy for Wegener to see that had he not gone to Greenland, he, and not de Quervain, would have been working with Hergesell. Moreover, de Quervain was rumored to be planning a meteorological expedition to Greenland, building on credentials established with Drygalski in the Antarctic in 1901–1903.
The other young meteorologist making an impact, Heinrich Ficker, had completed his dissertation at the University of Innsbruck in 1906, and in researching it, he had made more than 100 climbs near Innsbruck (the heart of Austrian �
�mountain meteorology”) to study the föhn. His work, not yet published but widely known, provided a strong empirical confirmation of Julius Hann’s theory of föhn winds and led Ficker to a job at Hann’s Zentralanstalt für Meteorologie at Vienna.6 Indeed, Wegener returned from Greenland to find that the question of the föhn, on which he had lavished so much effort and attention, was now generally considered to be nearly solved.7 If true, this would be a real dent in his accumulation of novel results, reducing him, in an area on which he had worked hard in 1907–1908, to the helpful (but minor) role of confirming another’s discovery.
The Hamburg Meeting
Wegener could see that he must get his Greenland results out quickly or, at the speed things were moving, there wouldn’t be any original results to get out. Here he was in luck. The triennial meeting of the Deutsche Meteorologische Gesellschaft (DMG) was to be held from 28 to 30 September 1908. Moreover, it was a special meeting: the twenty-fifth anniversary of the founding of the DMG. The meeting was to be held in Hamburg, returning to the site of its founding for the first time in a quarter century. While it would have been unlikely for Wegener to miss this meeting wherever it occurred, it was unthinkable for him not to attend a meeting arranged by Wladimir Köppen, the very man who had done so much to make possible his career in Arctic meteorology.
In spite of the Danmark Committee’s restriction on public lectures and on the reporting of scientific results before the expedition reports were out, Wegener submitted a proposal to Köppen to present a lecture at the Hamburg meeting on his research in Greenland, to be illustrated with lantern slides. Köppen was, of course, delighted. He immediately gave Wegener a prominent slot on the program and took the draft program for the meeting from his office in Hamburg to the family home in Großborstel. He always, as his daughter Else recalled, wanted the whole family to share his excitement in the development of his “young science.” He was especially enthusiastic about Alfred’s participation, telling his family that “we need in meteorology these days the kind of minds coming our way from physics; it is now time to comprehend and explain, from the standpoint of physics, the atmospheric processes we have discovered in the course of our kite and balloon ascents.”8
Köppen was himself vitally interested in developing a physics of the atmosphere. Though the bulk of his own efforts had been in descriptive climatology and in the study of climate cycles and periods of various kinds, he hoped that a global network of meteorological observatories would lead not only to a map of the world climate but to an accurate picture of the three-dimensional structure of the atmosphere. The latter would provide the observational basis for an atmospheric physics, and that physics, in turn, would lead to a theory of global atmospheric circulation and to an understanding of cyclonic storms—the great whirling high- and low-pressure systems that dominate the weather of the middle latitudes. Köppen had written much on the topic in the 1890s and had devoted a good deal of his own observational work at Großborstel to elucidating the problem; he had been willing to advance Wegener the instruments for Greenland precisely to extend kite and balloon observations of atmospheric behavior (well known at latitudes 30°–60° north) to latitudes above 75° north.
Now that Wegener was on the meeting program, he had to decide what to talk about and how to shape it for maximum effect. The only thing really in shape to go forward in a public arena was the aerology, and so he decided to concentrate on a description of the heart of his observation program, the kite and balloon ascents, to supplement that with photos of mirages (many of them spectacular), and to talk about his hopes to explain at least the polar föhn.
Wegener’s talk, given on 28 September, created quite a stir. It was a wonderful audience for him to face in his first major public lecture: the entire German meteorological community was there, as well as many foreign visitors, including Teisserenc de Bort. They were, of course, accustomed to hearing about voyages and expeditions: they all went on them; but this report of a two-year effort in the high Arctic was an unusual event even for them. Wegener certainly looked the part of the Arctic explorer. His frame was stocky and muscular, his hands large and rough. His skin was deeply tanned from two years’ exposure to sunlight and wind—not brown, but almost copper red, like an Inuit—an impression made more startling by contrast with his pale, gray-blue eyes.
When his turn came, he walked to the podium and, without preamble, began to speak in a clear, firm voice:
At the main station of the Danmark-Expedition, at Cape Bismarck at 76 3/4° north latitude, on the Northeast Coast of Greenland, between summer 1906 and summer 1908, somewhat more than 100 kite ascents were carried out, up to an altitude of 3100 meters, and 25 captive balloon ascents, up to 2300 meters. This is the first time that an aerological program has ever been successfully carried through to completion on a real Arctic expedition. I must note in passing that lack of funds forced me to work with extremely limited and scanty equipment, and you may easily imagine the difficulties experienced in carrying out such experiments, especially during the winter night.9
He sketched out his results quickly: the wind was remarkably constant from the northwest in all seasons and föhn-like. Winds from the east were rare and limited to the lowest 500 meters (1,640 feet). Temperature layering was very sharp, with many inversions in the first few tens of meters above the surface—in the spring there were inversions of up to 8°C (46°F) in the first 30 meters (98 feet). He then turned to the question of mirages, noting that this was the first systematic photographic study ever made of mirages, and launched into an excited technical discussion of their causes—a combination of inversions between 100 and 1,000 meters (328 and 3,281 feet), hyperadiabatic cooling in the lowest few meters, and, in winter, the release of heat by freezing water at the surface of the sea. After this discussion, he turned his attention to the establishment of the Pustervig station and his study of the föhn winds under circumstances in which mountain measurements could be made at elevations of 400 and 800 meters (1,312 and 2,625 feet) while simultaneous airborne measurements were under way on the coast, 60 kilometers (37 miles) distant.10
As is often the case in science, what looks like a bare summary of observations is actually a focused series of contributions to a set of ongoing controversies. If one were to rephrase Wegener’s talk with the questions put back in, it would sound something like this: “My extensive and original polar observations over two years confirm that the polar easterlies, like the low-latitude trade winds investigated (while I was away in Greenland) by Rotch, Teisserenc de Bort, and Hergesell, comprise a shallow frictional layer only a few hundred meters deep, with prevailing winds above the friction layer coming from an entirely different direction. Additionally, I can confirm that at very high latitudes, as at very low latitudes, the atmosphere is complexly layered up to about 1,500 meters (4,921 feet), and I have documented this both instrumentally and via photography—my pictures of mirages. These conclusions confirm our intuition that surface observations are extremely misleading in understanding atmospheric structure and dynamics, and that aerological investigations are required everywhere and at all times. I extended this observation program in the second year to take up the question of the föhn. I made wind and temperature observations both within and above the friction layer, at 400 and at 800 meters, simultaneously at an inland mountain station, and at the coast using kite observations. I should, from these data, be able to make a definite contribution not only to the study of the föhn but to the ongoing controversy in Germany, Austria, and elsewhere about the relative value of observations of temperature and wind at mountain stations and in the free air at the same altitude.” Wegener did not say this, but it is what his professional meteorologist listeners heard him say.
When Wegener had completed his brief summary (and implicit conclusions), he asked for the lights to be dimmed, and then he narrated his spectacular slide show. He showed the technique of kite and balloon launching in the cold and the dark, following this with a long sequence of his best mirage p
hotographs. He had, as well, a number of pictures of cloud forms and some beautiful close-up pictures of hoar frost; he concluded with a stunning color photograph of a Sun ring 800 meters in diameter, projected by local atmospheric conditions on the cliff face of the Monumentberg.11
It was a great performance, and he was right to be pleased by the effect, but more important to him than the praise and congratulations was the sheer intense pleasure of being once more in a group of people who understood what his work meant and with whom he could discuss it. He was starved for scientific conversation. He spoke at length with Aßmann, who was very interested, as usual, in correction coefficients: Wegener had some ideas about a new way to extrapolate temperatures, taken at 1,000 meters, up to a height of 1,500 meters.12 He spoke with Hugo Hergesell, who solicited his Danmarkshavn temperature data for a map he was preparing of the circumpolar weather in the Northern Hemisphere in July 1907, and who urged him to speak at the geographers’ meeting at Straßburg in November.13 He also spoke with Reinhard Süring (1866–1950), who was being promoted from Berlin to take over the meteorological station at Potsdam, and who invited Wegener to come see him in Berlin for further conversation in October.14
Alfred Wegener Page 30
