Wegener convalescing after the fall that tore his back and possibly broke a rib. From Koch, Gennem den Hvide Ørken.
Transporting their supplies and equipment across the fjord took eleven days, experimenting with different arrangements of sleds and loads for the extremely difficult and rapidly changing ice conditions. Wegener wrote on the twenty-third, “Half our baggage is now on the inland ice.… That the work has gone so smoothly is entirely due to Koch’s energy and initiative, without pushing the others or driving them unreasonably.”31 By the twenty-eighth of September, Koch wrote in his journal, “For the first time since we arrived in Greenland, we have all our gear in one place.”32 That place was an ice tongue in a 100-meter-wide ravine in the face of the Breda Brae ice front—younger glacier ice flowing between two rocky “headlands” surmounted by older, stable portions of the glacier. It was so sharply inclined at the upper end that they would have to cut stairs for themselves and the horses, but it was the only ingress in what was otherwise a sheer wall of ice. Here they piled their baggage and built a stall out of packing crates to keep the horses out of the snow and wind. This would be their staging area for the traverse to Dronning Louise Land, visible 20 kilometers (12 miles) away from the summit of this narrow road of ice.
In spite of his satisfaction that they had all the baggage assembled, Koch was worried about their situation. He had written in his journal on 22 September, “The margin of the glacier is not a secure place for a depot. Catastrophe threatens, something that could undo our expedition. But there’s nothing to be done: we have to proceed from this place forward or we won’t get to Dronning Louise Land this winter.”33
Koch’s fears were well placed. About three o’clock in the morning on 30 September, they were awakened in their tents by a series of loud reports, tremendous sounds of cracking and groaning. Wegener later wrote, “I crawled out of my sleeping bag as fast as my back pain would let me.”34 As he tied on his kamiks, he felt the ice beneath him bob up and down and the tent tilt over. He crawled out into the moonlight: “What a sight greeted my eyes around our camp. There, where our pathway up from the sea ice had been—30 meters from the tent and 20 meters from the stable—a colossal menacing black ice block now thrust upwards into the moonlight! (About 15 meters tall).”35 The ice tongue had split in half and calved a great iceberg, and the entire stretch of ice seaward from their tents—about 150 meters (492 feet)—had overturned. The remainder, including their depot, stable, and tenting place, was a chaotic jumble of rifted ice blocks. Half their baggage had fallen into a newly opened rift in the ice, which continued to crack, groan, and move. They scrambled up the ice road in the ravine, only to discover that they were now cut off by a new crevasse too wide to cross. One wall of the stable had collapsed, though neither affording a way for the terrified horses to escape nor falling in on them.
The cacophony of grinding ice continued as they tried to assess their situation. They were all mostly unharmed, as were the horses. Vigfus had bloodied his feet, running out barefoot onto the broken ice, but sustained no other injuries. They looked at each other in astonishment. “How is it possible,” wrote Wegener, “that with this incredible destruction proceeding all around us, that we have not lost our lives, and seem only to have lost a single piece of baggage?”36
Their painfully prepared ice road up the ravine was now once again a jumble of great broken ice blocks and would have to be rebuilt. Their position was precarious in the extreme. The ice tongue was unstable and in constant motion with the tide; it could calve again at any moment, and if it did, they would not escape so lightly. Wegener was still in such pain that he could barely stand erect, so he could not carry anything. He continued to cook and do what he could while the others worked furiously to move their provisions and gear onto the main stream of the Storestrømmen Glacier, nearly a kilometer beyond the ravine. As they looked seaward, they could see that the former ocean surface was now nothing but a jumble of icebergs and fragments of bergs: they counted seventeen new icebergs in the half square kilometer of ocean just to the east of them. They repeatedly heard the great crashing and tearing as new bergs formed, and the sound encouraged them to move faster. In the first two days after the catastrophe, they moved 14,000 kilograms (30,865 pounds) of baggage onto the Inland Ice—thirty-nine loads of 400 kilograms (882 pounds) each on the fourth of October alone—and they hoped to get the rest there in two more days.37
By 4 October they were 800 meters (2,625 feet) away from the calving front of the glacier, but they could not now pause, if they were to make it to their destination before deep winter. The very next morning they started off with six loaded sleds and a packhorse. It took them three and a half hours to cover a single kilometer of ice hummocks, and immediately they broke the runners on one of the lighter “Nansen” sleds. It was clear that these sleds, required for their traverse in the following spring, would be destroyed in the process of moving this final 20 kilometers inland. That meant that only the larger two-horse sleds could be used, and Wegener did the math. While the big sleds were supposed to carry a load of 3,500 kilograms (7,716 pounds), they had so far never done better than 2,000 kilograms (4,409 pounds). On this uneven ice, the most they could expect the horses to pull was 400 kilograms. With five days for each round trip, it would take them fifty days. They would never make it.
“The die is cast,” wrote Wegener on 7 October; “We can’t reach Dronning-Louise Land with our baggage. In spite of the whole summer we spent scanning the horizon, searching in the distance for that place our house would stand, we now must finally completely abandon all hope of reaching it. It is a real blow to us, but we tell ourselves: it is our future.”38
They would move a kilometer or two farther in, to the middle of the glacier, away from any chance of further calving. Wegener put a brave face on it: “If we stop here and build our house on the inland ice, we’ll have enough light to make a reconnaissance to Dronning Louise Land, which is much better now than trying it in the winter night.”39 If they stopped short of Dronning Louise Land, they could explore routes, lay down some depots, and start doing some science. If they tried to force the plan into late November and early December, they would exhaust themselves and accomplish nothing. There were plenty of crevasses nearby for Koch’s glaciology, and they would be sufficiently on the Inland Ice, a kilometer or two farther inland, to get meteorological measurements that could be said to have been made on the ice cap and not on its margin.
The Wintering
They were committed to staying where they were; therefore, they had to get the house assembled as quickly as possible. The temperature was well below freezing each day, with more and more blowing snow, making the work difficult and painful. Finally, on the ninth of October, it was clear, though very cold, and they quickly assembled the house; by the next day they were sleeping under its roof.40
There were various problems to be solved. The house was too snug, and the petroleum stove smoked, was finicky, and threatened several times to asphyxiate them; they noticed this when the lamps went out. Someone would yell, “Everybody into the next room!” It became a standing joke with them, when things went wrong through the next year, for someone to yell, no matter what the circumstances, “Everybody into the next room!”41 Dampness was a persistent problem, and the walls dripped water all during the winter. The photographic darkroom always had a wet floor, a problem they were unable to solve. With the horses, it was even more difficult. They had imagined they could manage without a floor for the horse stalls, but it turned out that the horse urine melted the ice and the horses kept sinking into the slush, so Larsen had to build floorboards out of packing crates. They had neglected to provide sufficient ventilation, and the methane from the horse dung created nauseating gas. Finally, ventilation pipes in the main room and the horse stalls were rigged in a way that increased the airflow sufficiently to keep them all, the horses included, from suffocating.
By the end of October, things were somewhat better. They had solved every p
roblem in the house except the persistent dampness. Their books were on the shelves, and they had hung the pictures they had brought with them of loved ones and home, though Wegener fretted because he could not find two pictures of Else, which had gone missing on the disembarkation from the ship and hadn’t turned up since.42
With the coming of the winter night, Wegener’s mood darkened. He had already noted in his diary that he feared the depressed, enervated state (Energielapsus) that had so compromised him in the winter of 1906. In the volatility of his mood toward the end of October and the beginning of November 1912, one can see his struggle with winter depression beginning anew. Every day brought a new crisis of sorts. The iron runner of one of their sleds broke transversely and was irreparable. Their mercury barometer, though nested in a packing case of its own, shattered on the last leg of the transport from the final depot to Borg. Their only galvanometer was useless. Material and mental casualties mounted in the midst of their own physical recovery from the wounds of the trek from the coast.43
There was further reason for Wegener’s pessimism and incipient despair. He, Koch, and Vigfus attempted a brief reconnaissance on the twenty-ninth and thirtieth of October, one of many attempts that winter to locate some way forward onto the main ice cap. They sank to their knees in the freshly fallen snow and had continuously to draw their sleds through empty watercourses atop the glacier and over ice hummocks the size of small hills. They estimated their forward progress on the twenty-ninth at 7 kilometers (4 miles), but they could not be sure because an accident broke their hodometer, the wheel attached by a strut behind one of the sleds, which measured the distance traversed in its revolutions and recorded their number. The second day they traveled barely 2.5 kilometers (1.6 miles): “at this rate,” wrote Koch in his journal, “it would take us more than a year to cross Greenland.”44
Wegener at his worktable in “Borg,” with the meteorograph recording temperature and humidity. Note the dampness of his hair; it proved impossible to keep the moisture level low and the house warm at the same time. From Koch, Gennem den Hvide Ørken.
Wegener was already in a dark depression by the end of the second day of travel. He wrote in his diary on the twenty-ninth (remembering Mylius), “The chances for our expedition are now not very good either. What lies in store for us? But these are ideas prompted by the winter darkness.” He then added, “The sunlight of spring will paint with different colors.”45
There was as yet little time for dark musing, in any case, as in addition to setting up the house they had to get the scientific program under way. Wegener worked to set up his meteorological station, with the precipitation gauge, the anemometer, the barograph, and the recording thermometer, and to get the line of poles sunk in the snow between the thermometer hut and Borg, to guide him back and forth in the winter night.
The loss of the mercury barometer, shattered in transport, was a very serious matter. They had also an aneroid barometer but now no means of calibrating it against the mercury barometer, and on the traverse across the ice cap the following spring, the measurement of altitude was to have been done by comparison of the reading on the aneroid barometer with that of a “boiling point hypsometer.” The difference between the boiling point of water at any given altitude and the boiling point at sea level gave a means for calculating the absolute altitude. One read the barometric pressure off the aneroid barometer and then discovered the boiling point of water by lighting a spirit lamp underneath a thermometer encased in a jacket of water. When steam was ejected from a pinhole vent at the top, one read off the temperature; one could then use this datum to determine the correction factor needed to reduce the aneroid barometric pressure to sea level, thus providing a measure of absolute altitude above sea level. With the mercury barometer gone, there was now no way to calibrate the aneroid barometer or the barograph.
Wegener’s meteorological program, other than station records, was a continuation of several of his current enthusiasms. He planned to continue his photography of ice crystals, as a part of his study of their formation under different temperature conditions. He had located a flat-topped knoll 5 kilometers (3 miles) to the west of Borg, which he could photograph to show the character of inversions in the first few meters of air above the surface; he christened this “Gundahl’s Knoll.” Finally, he planned to use their theodolite, their sole position-finding instrument, in order to calculate the altitude of the aurora. If all had gone as planned back in Europe, his brother Kurt would now be in Spitsbergen, ready to make observations of the aurora. They had agreed that on any night in which the aurora was persistent, they would measure its altitude. Knowing the exact time and date of these observations and their longitudinal differences would allow them to calculate the altitude of the aurora (in kilometers) to a high degree of accuracy across this long baseline and, by observation of its color, make inferences about the composition of the upper atmosphere.
The glaciological part of the expedition was a combination of the geography of the glacial ice with studies of the morphology of glaciers, including phenomena of fracture and flow and the interpretation of the “blue bands” in the ice. The latter, the alternation of bands of clear bright blue ice with bands of white ice, was not well understood. Were these bands surfaces of deformation, seasonal laminations, or infilling of fractures with meltwater? A good deal of this work was to be photographic documentation of the appearance of these various structures, principally by Wegener. In addition, Koch was very keen to study the laminar structure and the depth of the firn. Firn is snow that is left over and compacted after a full season of (summer) melting and ablation. The hexagonal crystals of newly fallen snow melt and then refreeze into a granular snow called névé. If this granular snow survives the melt season of one year, under the weight of newly fallen snow in the next season it is gradually compacted into firn. How long this process took was one of the most interesting things to be discovered about the ice cap; they had plans to dig deeply into it.
As a way of getting this scientific program under way, in the failing light of 5 November Koch set off with Larsen back in the direction of the last depot (where the iceberg had calved) to make a determination of their height above sea level. Larsen went first, probing the snow ahead of them to locate the crevasses with his alpenstock; there were several they knew they had to traverse. The abundant snow of late October and early November had begun to bridge the crevasses, and Larsen probed the snow bridges, as Koch followed in his footsteps.
They were most of the way to their destination when Larsen crossed a snow bridge and waited for Koch, who was carrying the theodolite, to follow him. The snow was deep and soft, and as Koch reached the middle of the bridge over the crevasse, it gave way completely and he fell, disappearing. The crevasse was not quite 2 meters wide, and he bounced off its walls as he fell, managing finally to stop his fall by grabbing hold of a ledge 12 meters (~40 feet) below the surface. He pulled himself onto the ledge and sat down in the snow-covered shelf. He was bleeding badly from his forehead, and his right foot was sharply painful and felt hot. He noticed the contrast because he could feel his other foot begin to freeze almost immediately.46 He was still conscious, and he told Larsen to go back for help and to bring rope and their rope ladder.
Now the roles were reversed, and it was Wegener’s turn to be filled with panicked thoughts as he and Vigfus skied toward the crevasse carrying the rope and rope ladder; Wegener had also thought to bring his novel electric flashlight. It had taken Larsen most of an hour to return to Borg, and they had to be careful themselves as they skied, not to fall as Koch had done. Wegener thought, “How will we find him … the entire expedition hangs on the strength of Koch’s personality. Is it possible that a badly injured man can lay motionless for two hours in this cold, without freezing to death?”47
Arriving at the crevasse, Wegener threw himself to the ground and yelled “hallo” as loudly as he could into the crevasse. To his intense relief, Koch was able to answer and told him that he had likely
only broken his foot and that he was not yet frostbitten. They lowered the rope ladder down and tied the electric lamp to the rope, lowering it as well, to give Koch a chance to locate the theodolite. The latter, however, had vanished into the crevasse and was nowhere to be seen. Koch pulled himself up the rope ladder with both hands, bracing himself with his left foot, his right hanging useless. His strength gave out 3 meters (10 feet) from the top, and they pulled him out the rest of the way.
Hours later, back at Borg, Wegener gloomily assessed their situation. “Has then, everything turned against us? There lies Koch, with a sprained ankle—that is if it’s not broken—with a swollen and bloody forehead and a fever, and we fear that he may have even more serious [internal] injuries not yet manifest.”48 Moreover, the loss of the theodolite was an unmitigated disaster: uncharacteristically, Koch had not brought a backup instrument. “We are going to have to go back down into that crevasse,” Wegener wrote, “because the theodolite is absolutely irreplaceable for our trip across the inland ice.”49
On 6 November, Koch was slightly better, but it was snowing heavily, and they could not leave to search for the theodolite: “Heaven knows where all this is going to end,” wrote Wegener.50 When the weather finally broke, they made two attempts to recover the theodolite, but to no avail. The snow-covered ledge on which Koch had landed was now under several meters of drifted snow, and the theodolite was still further down in the narrowest part of the crevasse. On the eleventh, Wegener finally surrendered to the inevitable: “Now we are completely out of luck … the theodolite is irretrievably lost, and it was not only our sole instrument for exact angular measurements, but I’d counted on for my meteorological work. Determination of time in winter (the proposed simultaneous auroral measurements with Kurt!), cartography, measurements of glacial movement, navigation on our great traverse, measurements of Sun rings and mirages—all of these will now be inaccurate, though at this point we are not yet completely resigned.”51
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