Alfred Wegener

by Mott T. Greene

  In early July Milutin Milankovich paid him a visit. Milankovich remembered meeting Wegener and Köppen at their garden gate (they had been reading in the back garden, but this gate was not built until the summer of 1926). They sat and talked for a while, and Wegener pressed Milankovich to see whether there was anything he could do to uncover the physical causes of the displacement of the pole. Milankovich remembers Wegener saying that as soon as he finished with Koch’s report on the investigation of Greenland, he intended to begin immediately on the fourth edition of his book, but that he needed to understand the mechanical reason why the poles should shift. He felt now that it was not so much a shift of surface masses, but some instability deep inside Earth. To Milankovich he appeared supremely confident.129

  While the continuing work on the glaciology was not intensive, it was certainly extensive. Under Wegener’s hand the manuscript continued to grow. By the time the semester ended, in July, the final product of all the expedition results appeared destined to appear as two volumes, totaling probably 700 pages. Even so, at least he was (for the moment) the sole author; not so for his Lehrbuch volume. This had also grown apace, especially the contributions by Benndorf and Hess on various topics in atmospheric electricity, which (alone) looked to be at least 150 pages of printed text. Ficker had gone even further, and his section on meteorology was almost 175 pages long.130 Wegener read these with extreme care: this was, after all, a textbook, and every formula and every diagram had to be correct. It now looked as if the completed book, in proof, might exceed 800 pages.

  Wegener was very much looking forward to the summer vacation. He would not carry his work with him, and he and Else had decided that this summer, now that the girls were older and stronger, they would take their vacation in the Ramsau, where they skied in the winter, and would spend the summer mountaineering. Wegener was more in touch now with his old expedition colleagues in Copenhagen. He would have liked it if Koch could have come to the mountains, but he could not, and Freuchen had only one good leg. He invited Andreas Lundager, the botanist and his old friend from the Danmark Expedition, to come for a visit, which he did.131

  Else remembers 1927 as a particularly wonderful summer in their rented house in the Ramsau. Her letters to her parents in Graz were so vivid and full of spirit that the old pair actually came to stay with them in the mountains. Köppen was delighted; in the move south in 1924 he had taken Marie on a vacation in the Alps, assuming that they would never be in the mountains again. Now Alfred and Else took both of them hiking, carrying folding canvas chairs so they would not have to sit on hard benches in the alpine huts, and so they could rest along the trail. She remembers that Alfred became insatiable in his desire to conquer every peak in the Dachstein, and that on rainy days he would pore over mountain guides, sometimes even leaving the family for a few days to climb in southern Germany.132

  In early September 1927, Else returned to Graz with the girls, who had to begin school. Alfred went north to Riga, in Latvia, where he had been invited by the Herder Gesellschaft to give a series of lectures. Shortly after he had published his work on lunar craters (in 1921), he began receiving letters from an engineer in Riga who believed that a circular depression on the island of Ösel (now Sarimaa), filled with water and about 100 meters (328 feet) across, was likely an impact crater, and who wanted Wegener to come and investigate it. He repeated his invitation to Wegener in 1925 and again in 1927. Now that Wegener had travel money, as well as the possibility of an honorarium for the lectures, he could afford to go and investigate.

  Wegener had other reasons to go north. In June he had received a letter from Johannes Letzmann (1885–1971), whom he had known during his short time in Dorpat in 1918. Letzmann, still a docent in meteorology at Dorpat, had read Wegener’s book on tornadoes and waterspouts and had begun a series of field observations, some theoretical work, and experimental simulations of tornadoes; this had now spanned almost a decade. He wanted to come to Germany to advance his scientific career and get more training. He had written to Wegener and to Ficker both, and Ficker agreed with Wegener that they should do something for him if they could.133

  In the middle of September Wegener went to Ösel to study the crater with his host, Rudolf Meyer. At the last moment, their party was joined by Ernst Kraus (1889–1970), a structural geologist from Riga. The outcome produced a scientific paper authored by Kraus, Meyer, and Wegener which was even longer than Wegener’s Vieweg book on the origin of lunar craters. Meyer and Wegener agreed that it was an impact crater, using the various metrics developed by Ebert for the Moon; the result was that the depression was exactly the same shape as the Meteor Crater in Arizona, only one-tenth the size. Kraus, however, was convinced that it was the remains of a salt dome that had been washed away, and the ultimate publication included a reconnaissance, Kraus’s view, and Wegener and Meyer’s view. Wegener ruefully reflected that he seemed unable to generate support and consensus even where there was only a single geologist involved.134

  The meeting with Letzmann after the lectures in Riga went well, and Wegener was impressed by the sophistication and depth of his work on tornadoes. They decided that Letzmann should come to Graz, and that they would spend the next year (1928) solving this problem—the origin and mechanics of tornadoes—together.135

  While he was in Riga, Alfred received a letter from Else informing him that a large tornado had struck just outside Graz on 23 September, causing much destruction. She had gone out “into the field” with the girls to walk the path of the funnel cloud and had noted that the trees had fallen in a vortex pattern. When Wegener returned to Graz, he and Else spent some time walking this tornado path and talking to those who might have seen and experienced it; it was a reprise of their 1916 collaborative field trip to investigate the meteor impact in Hesse.136 This cemented his resolve to bring Letzmann to Graz in the New Year; Letzmann had traveled extensively in the previous decade to study the path of every tornado he could reach, and now Wegener could see why.

  At summer’s end he had nearly completed the work on glaciology, especially the burdensome temperature calculations. He returned to this with renewed energy throughout October and early November 1927, and by late November he was able to send the promised manuscript to Koch in Copenhagen.

  In tandem with his work on his lectures, the editorial work, and finishing off the manuscript to send to Koch, he had spent the fall filling his notebook with more and more information to incorporate in the next edition of his book on continents and oceans. Direct notations from primary sources in this notebook end with material published in December 1927; the remainder of the notebook consists of calculations and interleaving of correspondence.137 One suspects that the volume of material he was reviewing had, by late 1927, far outgrown such a notebook, and Wegener’s increasing use of the typewriter after 1925 makes it likely that he had many other notes for the fourth edition than we see in these handwritten references. Nevertheless, it is clear that he had fully embarked on a new edition of this book, having fulfilled the prediction he made to Milankovich that he could begin as soon as he had finished editing Koch’s work.

  Wegener heard nothing from Copenhagen after sending off the manuscript. Then, just before Christmas, he received letters, almost on the same day, from Koch and from Jens Lindhard (1870–1947), the physician from the Danmark Expedition. Koch was cheerful and rueful; he explained to Wegener that he was going to be too ill for the foreseeable future to work on the manuscript, but that he had gone to the Carlsberg Foundation for funds to recompense Wegener should he have to work up all the results on his own. He had asked for 10,000 kroner, but the fund could only provide 2,000; “would that be enough?”138 Lindhard’s letter was a good deal less cheerful. Koch was extremely ill and had been in and out of the hospital, and the prognosis was not good. Wegener could read between the lines: Koch was dying.139 Lindhard wrote again on 12 January 1928 that Koch had been hospitalized and that the end was near. Koch died the next day.140

  Wegener learne
d of Koch’s death two weeks later, in a letter from his widow, Marie, who wrote to Wegener, “You have lost a beloved friend.”141 Lindhard wrote to Wegener on that same day (25 January 1928) to tell him that Koch had been buried and that his pallbearers were all colleagues from the Danmark Expedition.142 Wegener was not there to carry the body, but he was still destined to carry Koch’s weight. In early February Marie Koch sent to Wegener all of Koch’s notes, notebooks, manuscripts, offprints, and documents. Wegener was to be Koch’s literary executor; he would finish their joint work. He went through the documents quickly; they were rough, but he was up to the task. He would have to write up the material on the reconnaissance and supplement the informal mapping, but Koch’s sketches were good enough for that. It would add a month or two to the labor.143

  In early January 1928 Wegener had received a letter from his former student and colleague Johannes Georgi.144 They had last corresponded in 1925 when Georgi had sent Wegener a manuscript he had prepared on the measurement of wind speed; in 1926–1927 Georgi had gone to Iceland to make upper air observations and had discovered some curious high-velocity winds in the upper atmosphere, what we now know as the “jet stream.”145 Subsequently, he had traveled to Iceland and Greenland on the Meteor, now returned from its two-year voyage to the South Atlantic. Wegener and Georgi had seen each other at a meeting on measuring wind speeds in Potsdam in July 1927.146 Georgi, now back at the German Marine Observatory as head of the Instruments Section, told Wegener that he wanted to set up a base on the east coast of Greenland and overwinter to measure wind velocity and barometric pressure, and he also raised the question of a research station for overwintering on the Inland Ice. Both men were aware of the stirrings of plans to mount a second International Polar Year in 1932–1933, fifty years after the first such endeavor in 1882–1883. Whoever participated in or led such an expedition in Greenland in the next year or two would be positioned for a major role in the German planning of the Polar Year.

  Wegener wrote back immediately, congratulating him on his “beautiful plans” and wishing him the best of luck. “You are entering,” he said, “a fascinating area of research and your work in Iceland has already put you past the initial difficulties.” As for the plan for the overwintering station on the Inland Ice, Wegener said, “That’s an old plan of Freuchen’s, Koch’s and mine. If the war hadn’t come we’d have accomplished it long ago. However, in the meanwhile Freuchen has lost a leg, Koch is now too old and in the hospital and I have my own problems [und auch habe ich einen kleinen ‘Knax’] and am no longer a young man.”147

  Wegener told Georgi that he had planned to write an article on methods of work and a scientific program for such an expedition for the first issue of Arktis, the magazine of AEROARCTIC, to which organization Wegener was still the Austrian representative. He sketched out for Georgi the main theme: The expedition should use an airplane making repeated flights over the border of the Inland Ice to locate the best route onto the ice cap. Then a depot should be established at about an elevation of 2,000 meters (6,562 feet), and motorized sleds used to pull supplies and equipment to the middle of the ice. He noted, as a caution, that one would need a backup plan, that not everything could depend on the plane, and that one had to plan for a situation in which the plane crashed on its first flight.148

  The ascent to the Inland Ice, Wegener wrote, should happen from the western coast, because it is so much easier, and he stressed that it was hardly possible to overstate the danger, cost, and risk of failure of an attempt to mount the ice from the east. Don’t take my word for it, Wegener cautioned him, but read the accounts of previous expeditions. He was, of course, referring to his own terrible troubles in 1906–1908 and 1912–1913.149

  He also briefly sketched the sort of work that should take place: climatology, aerology, glaciology, measurements of ice thickness, elevations, and measurements of gravity. He concluded by saying, “You can see how much your plan interests me, and it would naturally make me very happy if you would keep me up-to-date as your plans continue to develop. With greetings from our house to your house, faithfully yours, Alfred Wegener.”150

  With that, Wegener turned back to editing the very large pile of manuscripts for the Lehrbuch which had accumulated during his absence (the family had taken their traditional Christmas skiing vacation in the Ramsau). It was good to think of the next generation coming forward to take up the work in Greenland where he had left off, but it also made him wistful. Arctic research was, as he told Georgi, “a fascinating area,” and as he reviewed his and Koch’s glaciological work, he could see many more questions than answers. Moreover, he now had Hans Heß’s manuscript on the physics of glaciers for the Lehrbuch; with a handful of exceptions, the literature Heß cited was all from the nineteenth century. What new information there was about temperature at depth in glaciers came from an article by Koch in 1913.151 As for the glaciology of the great masses of Inland Ice in Greenland and Antarctica, Hess had almost nothing to say. Maybe there would be time later in the year for Wegener to actually write the article for Arktis on methods for an expedition like Georgi’s, but for now there was the rest of the work from 1912–1913 and the new edition of the book on the origin of continents and oceans.

  19

  Theorist and Arctic Explorer

  GRAZ AND GREENLAND, 1928–1929

  The Newton of the displacement theory has not yet appeared. One need not fear that he will fail to arrive; the theory is still young and is today widely doubted, and, in the end, one can hardly blame the theorist if he hesitates to spend the time and trouble on the elucidation of a law when no consensus prevails about its validity. In any case, it is likely that the full solution of the problem of the forces [driving displacement] will be a long time coming.

  ALFRED WEGENER (1928)

  I have the conviction that the current preference for “economically valuable” research is as unwise as it is immoral. Unwise—for hundreds of examples show that any economically valuable discovery is based on numerous others that have no apparent economic benefits. But forego the latter, and the “economically valuable” research comes to a halt.—Immoral … because to the scientist the Holy of Holies must be discovery of the world around us and its laws, to which he dedicates his life. Utility is not his aim and it does not need to be, because he has already found another. If he switches to practical use, he abandons this sacred quest and has ceased to be a scientist in the true sense. Fortunately, the economic motivation that the scientists today assert to get the funds for their research are, in the majority of cases hypocrisy, something like Kepler, paying his way by casting horoscopes.

  ALFRED WEGENER TO WILLI MEYER (1929)

  Throughout the spring of 1928, Wegener could not stop thinking about the Arctic. It was not for lack of other work: he had published his description of the tornado that swept through the eastern part of Styria the previous September. This had turned his mind again to the theory of the mechanics of tornadoes and waterspouts, and he had written a highly original paper on their formation. He now believed that the genesis of tornadoes came from what he called a Mutterwirbel (mother-vortex) with a horizontal axis created by wind shear; he had discussed this at length with Letzmann, now in Graz to work with him; Letzmann agreed that this was a promising line of attack. This horizontally rotating vortex in the wind shear zone, at an altitude of 3–4 kilometers (1.9–2.5 miles), could then be pulled up to the vertical, where it connected with the powerful up- and downdrafts in a thunderstorm; this would increase the energy of the vortex, which would then travel along with the thunderhead. Once again, it was a phenomenon created at a discontinuity, with air masses of different velocities moving past each other, and creating waveforms that actually turned into vortices.1

  In later February he had received the rest of Koch’s notes and maps, and this cartographic and reconnaissance work reminded him again and again of what he had loved best about Greenland: the exploring. His mind kept turning to Georgi’s recent plan; it was a good one, ti
mely and likely to be productive. He also recalled the difference between his and Koch’s difficult traverse in 1913 from east to west and de Quervain’s relatively easy travels in that same year going from west to east, beginning from Disko Island near Jacobshavn. Georgi’s instinct, to approach the Inland Ice from the east, in a section of coast that was not well known, was exactly the wrong approach. One should, Wegener now believed, begin any expedition from the west, and from a point within easy range of a major Danish settlement. Such an expedition could employ regular Danish commercial shipping and establish cooperation with the Danish government at trading stations and provincial outposts, to ease the logistics. Wegener also knew what Georgi did not yet know well enough: there is no need to look for danger in the Arctic; it comes to you on its own.

  At just about the time that Marie Koch sent the parcel of her husband’s diaries, notes, and maps, Wegener received a letter from Arthur Berson, who had been the head observer and aeronaut at Lindenberg twenty years prior. Berson was one of the leaders of AEROARCTIC and wanted Wegener to give an address at the second congress of that organization, to be held 18–23 June 1928 in Leningrad (St. Petersburg). Wegener was on the board of directors and a member of both its aerological-meteorological commission and its technical committee. Berson had written to Wegener to ask him for a title for his address and to promise that whatever he wrote should be published in Arktis, probably in the July 1928 issue. He noted, however, that what was important was that Wegener’s voice be heard at the congress; he should put more energy into the lecture than the paper for Arktis.2

  Wegener agreed and sent a title: “Working Conditions and Tasks for a Station on the Greenland Inland Ice.” As German polar historian Cornelia Lüdecke has pointed out, “Wegener often went his own way,” and this was one of those occasions.3 Wegener not only sent the title to Berson but also told Erich Kuhlbrodt (now back from the Meteor Expedition) that he would give a lecture at Hamburg in September (at a major scientific meeting) on “Problems of Greenland’s Inland Ice.”4 The aeronautical part of Wegener’s “working conditions and plans” for Greenland had nothing to do with zeppelins (the whole thrust of AEROARCTIC). Rather, he urged that fixed-wing aircraft could carry out aerial reconnaissance of entry points to the interior of the ice and rapid surveys of the Randzone (the edge of the ice). Later in such an expedition, one or more such aircraft, with their wings removed, might serve as propeller-driven motor sleds to pull loads of material to the interior of Greenland.5