Alfred Wegener

by Mott T. Greene

  Wegener had it in mind to have Hans Mothes (the seismologist) join the expedition to Greenland to be in charge of the seismic investigations, and during the Alpine tour with Loewe in early August (Else came along to climb with them) he made the request. Mothes thought it over but regretfully declined, so Wegener sent Loewe into the field again in late August and early September for another week of training with Mothes; Wegener had wrangled a stipend from the Notgemeinschaft for Loewe to work as Mothes’s assistant. He added in his letter to Loewe as a postscript, “I hope you will not be angry with me for the way I order you about!”82

  Wegener liked Loewe and trusted him enough already to ask his advice about someone to replace Mothes for the expedition, now that the latter had declined. Loewe made some suggestions, and Wegener finally decided on Ernst Sorge (1899–1946), a young geographer (a student of Penck) and a much-respected alpine climber who had been climbing since 1920 not just in Germany and Austria but also in Iceland. Like Sorge and Georgi, he had also seen war service. Wegener, on 8 September, invited Sorge to join the expeditions, and Sorge replied immediately in the affirmative.83

  Now things could begin to move rather more rapidly, and as they did, the first hints of tension began to emerge between Wegener and Georgi on the matter of what should be in the final plan submitted to the Notgemeinschaft. Wegener and Georgi were in full agreement on the scientific plan, but Georgi had rather different ideas about logistics and transport: he wanted it to be a completely “modern” expedition, of the kind that was going forward in Antarctica with Byrd, with only motorized transport—airplanes and motor sleds or tractors.

  Wegener’s thinking was quite different. He had drawn up three different scenarios for the logistical structure of the expedition. All of these included an approach to the Inland Ice from the west coast of Greenland; the approach from the east was simply too difficult. It was too isolated, the crevasse fields were massive, and for some hundreds of miles the ice front was inaccessible, a cliff rather than a slope. The expedition would travel to Greenland by commercial Danish shipping and transfer the supplies to an ice-hardened coasting vessel in West Greenland; the expedition would also have a 9-meter (30-foot) boat with an 8-horsepower engine and a hull strong enough to push through light pack ice.

  The logistical task was to move 70,000 kilograms (154,324 pounds) of equipment, food, housing, fuel, and accessory supplies from sea level to a winter station within the margin of the Inland Ice at an altitude somewhere between 500 and 1,000 meters (1,640–3,281 feet), perhaps 100 kilometers inland. From there, approximately 10,000 kilograms (22,046 pounds) would be transported 400 kilometers (249 miles) further, to a planned mid-ice station at an altitude of 3,000 meters (9,843 feet).

  In his draft plan, Wegener considered three options. The first would be entirely traditional transport: Icelandic ponies and sleds of the kind he had used in 1912–1913, along with dogsleds of the kind used by most expeditions. The latter would be hired, with the dogs and drivers from among the local population.84

  The second alternative was to supply the Inland Ice base using airplanes. Wegener clearly did not favor this alternative, as adding a pilot, a mechanic, and a replacement pilot would mean possibly three more members for the expedition, and with each additional person came thousands of kilograms of supplies. Wegener also doubted that a sufficiently flat landing strip could be found anywhere along the coast, and he was sure that, during the winter, flight would be impossible, as repeated experience had shown a tendency for the fuel lines to freeze at temperatures of −50°C and −60°C (−58°F to−76°F). Moreover, should something happen to the plane, repair in Greenland was impossible. Georgi was strongly in favor of employing aircraft, but as Wegener had pointed out to him the previous spring, the expedition had to be prepared for the plane to crash on its initial flight, and the inland base would still have to be supplied. This would mean horses, dogs, or both.85

  The third alternative would be snow tractors or propeller-driven motor sleds, of the kind currently being used successfully for winter transport on land and sea ice in Finland and Sweden. The motor sleds were aerodynamic plywood skimobiles with push engines (the propeller and engine at the back), a carrying capacity of about 1,200 kilograms (2,646 pounds), and a maximum speed somewhere around 40 kilometers per hour (25 miles per hour). These would be of little or no use in the steep coastal zone, which would still require animal transport, but the flat and even surface of Greenland’s interior made them technologically almost ideal. They required no landing and takeoff spot and could serve for regular communication in all but the depths of winter between the mid-ice station and the coast. The alternative—snow tractors—could pull uphill, but they were enormously heavy and slow and not terribly fuel efficient.

  Here was the basis of the disagreement between Wegener and Georgi. Wegener could not see any way to plan an expedition that could avoid a catastrophic failure of supply without the use of pack animals. Georgi pleaded with him to submit a plan that did not mention the use of draft animals, either ponies or dogs. He wanted to use the reconnaissance expedition to find a place where they could land planes and drive motor sleds up onto the ice. He feared that the Notgemeinschaft, if offered the low-cost alternative of animal transport, would fail to fund either airplanes or motor sleds.

  They discussed this in an exchange of correspondence in September, and Wegener finally emphatically refused to drop reference to animal transport. “I think that one of our most important technical tasks is closing the gap between the old methods of animal transport, and the new mechanical means of travel.”86 Georgi was apparently one of those men who cannot take no for an answer when they hear it the first time, or even the second. Wegener made it clear that his strong preference was for propeller sleds, but through the fall and into the winter of 1928, Georgi tried to press for the use of air transport for the central station, enlisting Walther Bruns (1889–1955), the general secretary of AEROARCTIC, to advance his case.87

  Fortunately, Georgi and Wegener were at least agreed on the scientific program for both the reconnaissance expedition and the main expedition. This plan, as Wegener circulated it in the summer of 1928 and submitted it in the fall to the Notgemeinschaft, had six parts.88 The first was the measurement of the thickness of the ice cap directly using the seismic technique of Mothes. These would be the first measurements of the full ice cap thickness ever taken. The second objective was an exact trigonometric leveling of the altitude of the ice surface above sea level in a profile from the coast to the center of the ice, to serve as an exact baseline for future measurements to determine whether the thickness of the ice was increasing or decreasing. The third objective, closely connected with the first two, was the use of a pendulum gravity-measuring device (a Sterneck pendulum, a tried-and-true instrument) along the same transect as the trigonometric measurements and the seismic measurements, to help determine the extent of isostatic compensation. There would also be direct glaciological measurements of ice temperatures in boreholes, as well as measurements of glacier motion.

  The second set of objectives, developed at length, were those in meteorology, most of them directed to the fulfillment of Georgi’s plans for an overwintering station in the middle of the ice and a station on the east coast of Greenland. The principal goal for these stations was to track the upper atmospheric winds and to examine whether or not there was such a thing as Hobbs’s “glacial anticyclone,” a permanent high-pressure vortex generated by the intense cold of the interior of Greenland, which would block the transit of cyclonic storms across the ice cap. Having three stations would allow meteorological observers on both coasts and in the middle at the same latitude to generate a series of simultaneous observations, which could demonstrate the existence or absence of such a blocking high-pressure center.

  In addition to this, there were other more direct and local meteorological problems. No one knew how cold it got (and stayed) in the middle of the ice in the winter because no one had ever been there all winter.
Neither was there any secure knowledge about the kind and quantity of precipitation. Atmospheric optics—measurement of radiation, mirages, and other matters of interest to Wegener—could also be handled at all three of the stations, although Wegener planned to make these measurements during the overwintering at the station on the west coast, to which he has assigned himself.

  Wegener had assured Georgi that he would have a secure place as meteorologist at the central station, that he would be accompanied by a glaciologist/meteorologist, probably Sorge, and that they would be joined by a technical assistant (Hilfsarbeiter) who would also function as the radio operator. Wegener wanted Georgi to understand and to feel that his plan had not been hijacked and would not be diminished. As they worked through the plan together, this had to be evident to Georgi, as the overwhelming logistical cost of the expedition was directed to the creation, supply, and staffing of the station in the middle of the ice cap, where the observations would “belong” to Georgi, and where he would be an independent operator.

  All of this moved from conjecture to fact in early November 1928, when the four members of the reconnaissance expedition, who would also form the leadership core of the 1930–1931 main expedition, met in Berlin with the Greenland Committee established by the director of the Notgemeinschaft, Friedrich Schmidt-Ott (1860–1956). The committee was well stacked in Wegener’s favor. A good deal of political maneuvering, in which Wegener was not directly involved, had already been accomplished to keep the expedition from being postponed until the international polar year 1932–1933; there was agitation in some quarters that this should happen.89

  Hergesell, Penck, Drygalski, Kohlschütter, Angenheister, Meinardus, and Defant were there to ensure the support of meteorology, geography, oceanography, geophysics, the Admiralty, and the German university community in general for Wegener’s proposal. Meinardus had let it be known that he feared that the principal aim of the expedition, the glacial seismology, might later be excised from the Polar Year program, and everyone agreed that Wegener, who would be past the age of fifty in 1932, might not any longer be a candidate to lead an expedition that he clearly very much wanted to lead.90

  The committee approved the scientific program and even extended support for the East Greenland station at Scoresby Sound, approving as well the transport scheme, with the motorboat, twenty-five Icelandic ponies, dogs and dogsleds, and two propeller sleds, which, the official report noted, the expedition leader had particularly specified as needed for the geophysical program on the Inland Ice once the mid-ice station had been established, especially because of the huge weight of food required (alternatively) to keep dogs on the ice over the winter.91 Here was something to placate Georgi, who had wanted motorized transport, not ponies and dogs.

  The Vorexpedition to Greenland, 1929

  Everyone who knew Wegener, especially Else, Georgi, and Benndorf, remembered that the late fall of 1928 and the early spring of 1929 were for him times of furious and continuous activity: planning, building, buying, cajoling, traveling, meeting, negotiating, and above all writing letters, sometimes a dozen or more a day. The money from the Notgemeinschaft began to arrive in December 1928, and after the Christmas vacation in the Ramsau (he invited Georgi and his family, but we do not know whether they came), Wegener began to spend it. He bought as much modern lightweight camping equipment as he could get: no more reindeer-skin sleeping bags, but lightweight waterproof bags weighing under 3 kilograms (7 pounds), and lightweight waterproof tents with bamboo poles, flexible and light. He searched for the lightest instruments he could find, and he ordered ultralight Nansen sleds, modern versions of the lightweight man-hauled sledges used by Nansen in his first traverse of Greenland, for the reconnaissance expedition.

  He had placed an order for a boat to be built already in the fall of 1928, at the same company in Copenhagen which had built the boat he and Koch had used in 1912–1913. It had a new design motor, built by the “Dan” company, a so-called hot bulb engine, intermediate between a gasoline and a diesel engine, which could burn almost anything: gasoline, heavy oil, kerosene, even blubber.92 This boat, to be christened Krabbe, was a 9-meter cabin cruiser of the kind he had owned in Hamburg, and he specified that in addition to a reinforced deck, a large cargo hold, and bunks for four men, it should have a photographic darkroom, a necessity for an expedition that would be extensively documented with photographs. Wegener also placed an order for prefabricated huts from the same Danish company that had built the huts in 1912; in every case it was his instinct to go with what he knew, and there was also considerable goodwill to be generated in Denmark by purchasing these things there.

  In mid-March 1929, shortly before the planned departure of the Vorexpedition from Copenhagen to Greenland, and with his bags (literally) already packed, he and Else traveled to Sweden and Finland to make the final decision between propeller-driven motor sleds (made in Finland) and continuous-tread tractors (made in Sweden). Wegener had hoped to test-drive the propeller sleds in Finland, but there was bad weather—rain and no snow—so he drove the sleds on sea ice rather than uneven ground. They seemed marvelous—although might prove finicky—but the continuous-tread tractors they examined in Sweden were so heavy that they made the propeller sleds the safer option, so he chose the latter. If a tread tractor were to tip into a crevasse, there would be no pulling it out. Else, who had been with him on this trip, traveled to Oslo to see the Bjerknes family, and Wegener headed to Copenhagen, in order to travel on to Greenland with his reconnaissance team: Georgi, Loewe, and Sorge.93

  The Vorexpedition to Greenland was to last from late April until early October 1929. The principal object was to find a way onto the Inland Ice in west central Greenland, somewhere between Quervainshavn (N 69°) and Umanak Fjord (N 71°). In this region, unlike the dry coast farther south, the Inland Ice lies very close to the shore, and many glaciers flow directly to the sea from the Inland Ice. Farther north, in the Upernavik district (~N 72°), the Inland Ice also comes to the shore, but the annual timing of the “ice-out” (melting of the sea ice) was so late as to make it a doubtful landing point for an expedition.

  In the expedition plan agreed upon with the Notgemeinschaft, the mid-ice station should be at latitude 71° north, in order to be in line with the east coast station at Scoresby Sound. The question was how best to approach the ice. The southerly candidate site, opposite Disko Island, was the starting point chosen by Alfred de Quervain in his successful 1912 traverse from west to east, thus the name Quervainshavn. From here, the planned expedition for 1930 would have to take a northeasterly route to reach latitude 71° north; the extra distance was not great, more or less the hypotenuse of a right triangle whose base was parallel to the coast and its altitude along the line of latitude 71° north.

  The northerly route would be on the northern side of the Nugsuak (today Nugssuaq) Peninsula just to the north of Disko Island, in the Umanak District, where there were a number of glaciers from the Inland Ice emptying directly into the sea. This area was less well known, though Drygalski had investigated it, as he had the region just to the south, between 1891 and 1893.

  The principal scientific aim of the reconnaissance, and the reason for this entire effort, was to test the seismic method of measuring ice thickness with explosion seismology. They would take 100 kilograms (220 pounds) of dynamite and their portable seismometer onto the ice (and firn) and determine whether the technique would work under such conditions. The subsidiary scientific aims of the expedition were to compare the extent of the glaciers mapped by Drygalski in 1891–1893 with their extent in 1929, and to make some boreholes in the ice and insert bamboo wands into them, so that they might return the following year and measure the growth or ablation of the ice at several locations and the depth of new snow. They would make meteorological observations and measure their altitude and position, and they would spend a week at Jacobshavn Glacier measuring its extent and motion.

  In addition, there were two other sets of tests. The first was with equipment an
d food. Wegener remembered all too clearly the immense difficulty of men hauling sledges with loads in excess of 68 kilograms (150 pounds) during his reconnaissance with Koch in 1907 and again in 1912. In planning this expedition he did everything he could to conserve weight; in addition to the light sleeping bags and tents, he ordered sleds in two different models, one slightly sturdier, at 8 kilograms (18 pounds) per sled, and the other less robust, at 4.5 kilograms (10 pounds) per sled. The idea was that each man should pull no more than 45 kilograms (99 pounds), including the weight of his sled. Also undergoing tests were their footwear, their clothing, the lightweight instrumentation, and a variety of concentrated “sledging rations,” including a kind of pemmican developed by Amundsen.

  The second test was the men themselves. What were they like, and how would they respond to the hardship? Wegener had to learn what his physical capacities were at age forty-eight; certainly they would not be the same as when he was twenty-six (1906) or thirty-two (1912). As for Georgi, Loewe, and Sorge, they had to learn everything: how to sledge; how to drive dogs; how to sleep, work, and travel in bad weather when wet and cold; how to march twelve to fourteen hours a day and then to pitch camp, cook food, melt water, record their work in their diaries, take photographs, and make scientific observations. There were no alpine huts here, no day trips, and no backup; they would carry their lives with them on their sleds.