Alfred Wegener devoted his entire life to the study of surfaces of discontinuity, searching for the invisible causes that bring about sharp changes in the behavior of matter and energy. There is no discontinuity more abrupt and complete than that between life and death. For Wegener there was no slow decline in power, no retirement, no slide into obscurity; he died at the peak of his power, ambition, and scientific productivity. He died in the midst of Die Arbeit—the work—in which he so deeply believed, and for which he was willing to give his life.
In the very week that Wegener’s body was discovered, on the other side of Greenland, Augustine Courtauld (1905–1959) was rescued from the Inland Ice station where he had wintered alone for five months as the solo meteorologist for the British Arctic Air Route Expedition. News of his rescue and its aftermath often appeared on the same page in the New York Times as news of Wegener’s death. When Courtauld was asked whether it had been “worth it,” he responded, “The objects of the Expedition, like most objects of most Expeditions were the means of living the life [we] liked to live, rather than ends in themselves.”103 This is not exactly how Wegener felt, but it is close. Arctic exploration and polar science are, as he warned Georgi, seductive and intoxicating pursuits, and it is not uncommon for polar explorers to continue to return to the north (or the south) until they meet their deaths in the midst of this work, or, like Freuchen, become so badly injured that they cannot continue. One is never too old. Amundsen was fifty-six when he disappeared in 1928 in the course of the rescue of the crew of the zeppelin Italia.
Wegener’s 1930–1931 expedition was the last pulse of the great age of heroic exploration. With his death on the ice cap, he joined a long sequence of Arctic explorers who met their end in the midst of their polar work—he was immediately added to the list that includes Sir John Franklin, Amundsen, and Scott. He is today, in histories of polar travel, also classed with Mawson, Shackleton, Nansen, and Rasmussen. Wegener was, along with Rasmus Villumsen (1908–1930), one of the last great casualties of that age.
Wegener’s expedition was Keplerian, a watershed event bridging the old (sailing ships, ponies, dogs, exploration of uncharted territory) and the new (motorboats, motorized sleds, radio communication). For the last two years of his life, Wegener increasingly saw his own work in this light and was not unhappy about it. Transitions, of course, sometimes just happen, but they go better when they are planned. As a young man he had thought of himself as a revolutionist; as a mature man he viewed life, human history, science, and the cosmos itself from the standpoint of the theory of evolution, in which every step is necessary, and every step is meaningful, no matter how slow and insignificant it may appear at the time.
Wegener did not live a hero’s life and would have scorned the idea, but it was not within his power to keep himself from becoming a hero after his death. Today, his reputation persists as Germany’s greatest polar explorer, and Germany’s Institute for Polar and Marine Research is named for him. So is the peninsula in Greenland just to the north of Kamarajuk Glacier, now the Alfred Wegener Halvø, 71.1° north, 51.8° west.
There is a “Wegener” crater on the Moon, at 45° north, 114° west. It is slightly irregular, about 90 kilometers (56 miles) in diameter, and (perhaps fittingly) on the dark side of the Moon. There is also a Wegener crater on Mars, 64° south, 355°, filled with dunes and changing color each year, from summer black to winter frost and back again. Wegener would have been embarrassed by this honor publicly but enjoyed it privately, as he would have enjoyed having his name given to an asteroid: “29227 Wegener,” an object with a regular period, a known eccentricity, and an inclination known to five decimal places. He would have, had he lived to see it, quite likely amused himself by checking the accuracy of the orbital calculations and trying to figure out a means to get there.
Epilogue
The biography of a man of science can never end with his death. If his contributions to science are important enough to warrant a detailed account of his life, then his effect upon science does not end when he dies. The facts he discovers are rapidly assimilated and become part of the mainstream of science. When, as was the case with Faraday, the factual discoveries were the results of a radically new vision of physical reality the process of assimilation is not so rapid.
L. PEARCE WILLIAMS, Michael Faraday (1964)
Kurt Wegener sailed to Greenland in June 1931, and in July he took over the expedition. This proved to be a matter of some controversy, as Loewe had assumed tacit leadership from the time of the discovery of Wegener’s body in May. The expedition members, used to Alfred Wegener’s and then Loewe’s rather loose and free-form leadership, chafed under Kurt Wegener’s strong direction, and there were a number of disputes, both personal and professional.1
During the summer of 1931, the seismic exploration and gravity surveys proved that Greenland was an ice-filled bowl and that “glacial isostasy” and the larger principle of isostasy were true—answering the question that Nansen had posed fifty years before. The bulk of meteorological and glaciological results of the expedition and its geodetic measurements of altitudes of the ice cap were unremarkable, though they went into the mainstream of polar meteorology and glaciology. There was one exception. The three stations at latitude 71° north were able to track the west-to-east travel of cyclonic storm systems throughout the autumn and winter of 1930 and the spring and summer of 1931. The steady passage of these systems was strong evidence against the existence of any persistent high-pressure area, or “glacial anti-cyclone,” in the middle of the ice cap. Thus, two of the major aims of the expedition, both with theoretical significance, came to pass as part of Wegener’s legacy.
While at Eismitte in winter and spring 1930/1931, Georgi discovered that he had 40 percent more food and fuel than he had told Wegener. There was, after all, sufficient means of existence for all five men (including Wegener and Rasmus) to winter over. As Cornelia Lüdecke has pointed out in a long examination of the factors leading to Wegener’s death, it is hard to imagine how one could be wrong by a factor of two under such circumstances.2
This (along with several other issues) led to a long and bitter dispute—die Schuldfrage (the question of guilt)—driven less by public accusations than by Georgi’s increasing fear that he had somehow caused Wegener’s death. His published defenses and self-exculpations (against no specific charges) finally led to a legal dispute with Kurt, and eventually a bitter dispute with Else, over the way Georgi was “presented” in the film of the expedition and in the accounts of the expedition (both official and nonofficial) published in 1932–1934. These exchanges became so nasty and shrill that in 1937 a court ordered all parties to desist.
From the very beginning Else had tried to prevent this from happening, and in October 1931 she had written to the Notgemeinschaft begging them to make sure that “the silly question of guilt” would not become part of the legacy of the expedition. In consequence, Schmidt-Ott traveled to Copenhagen to meet the returning expedition members in November 1931, securing a promise from them not to discuss details of expedition events and especially of Wegener’s death.3 Georgi, always jealous of his reputation, and now besieged by feelings of guilt and shame, continued to publish defenses, which only made his position worse.
Else edited the story of the expedition, with chapters written by each of the scientific and technical participants (including Georgi): Alfred Wegeners Letzte Grönlandfahrt. By the early 1940s it had gone through fourteen editions and had been translated into Danish (in 1933) by Andrea Lundager (with a foreword by Rasmussen) and into English (in 1939) as Greenland Journey.4
Michael Spender, writing in the Geographical Journal in 1934, reviewed Kurt Wegener’s official account of the expedition, the volume edited by Else, and Georgi’s separate account of the expedition: Im Eis Vergraben. Spender remarked, “Dr. Georgi’s book … is not so happy in its achievement [as the other two volumes]. On the disinterested reader the undercurrent of polemic will produce quite the opposite effect
to that intended by the author.… If Dr. Georgi still thinks that anyone believes that the burden of the tragedy rests upon him, then he would have done better to let the account published by Kurt Wegener speak for him than to publish this book 2 years later.”5
In 1932 Sorge and Loewe went back to Umanak (along with their wives) as “scientific advisers” on an Arnold Fanck action film, S.O.S. Eisberg, about the search for the lost papers of a famous scientist missing on an ice cap. The film starred, among other contemporary action heroes, Leni Riefenstahl. It is available on DVD in both German and English versions and begins with two cigar-smoking gents in an explorer’s club strolling past portraits of the “greats” of polar exploration, pausing before the portrait of Wegener, last in the sequence, whereupon one of the men says, “and then Wegener, the greatest of them all.”6
After Wegener’s Death
Kurt took over Alfred’s professorship in Graz in 1931; he lived “in rooms” in Graz’s main hotel, rather than joining the Wegener household on the Blumengaße (by then renamed “Alfred Wegener-Gaße”). He edited the expedition’s final reports, appearing over the course of a decade beginning in 1933. In 1935 he published Vorlesungen über Physik der Atmosphäre (Lectures on atmospheric physics) under his and his brother’s names, and he also oversaw another (5th) edition of Die Entstehung der Kontinente und Ozeane, with unchanged text but a larger bibliography.7 After the Anschluß (the assimilation of Austria into Nazi Germany), he resigned his professorship and went to Argentina, not returning to take it up again until 1952.
As for Wegener’s daughters, Hilde became a nurse and died in 1936 of typhus, while nursing victims of an epidemic. Lotte, in 1938, married the famous mountaineer Heinrich Harrer (1912–2006), who later became the tutor of the Dalai Lama and wrote Seven Years in Tibet. The marriage ended in divorce. Käte, in 1939, married Siegfried Uiberreither, Nazi governor of Styria and a notorious SS officer who fled into hiding after the Second World War to avoid extradition to Yugoslavia for war crimes.
Marie Köppen, Else’s mother, died in 1939, and Wladimir Köppen died the following year. He was still correcting proofs of his climate handbook during his final illness, at which time he sent a telegram to his publisher: “Please hurry. Am dying.” In 1955 Else wrote his biography with help from Erich Kuhlbrodt, under the pen name Else Wegener-Köppen: Wladimir Köppen: Ein Gelehrtenleben für die Meteorologie.8
In 1960 Else wrote a book about her husband, a narrative of his life with extracts from his expedition journals and letters: Alfred Wegener: Tagebücher, Briefe, Erinnerungen.9 Most of what we know of Wegener’s personal life comes from this one source. The majority of Wegener’s papers in Graz were lost or destroyed in the chaos after the war. Eventually, Else moved to the Tyrol; in later years she and Kurt lived together as brother and sister. Else died in 1992 at the age of 100.
Wegener’s Scientific Legacy
Wegener is unquestionably the progenitor of the theory of the origin of continents and oceans by means of continental drift. No other scientist in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries considered the matter in anywhere near the detail or with anything like the persistence that Wegener showed between 1912 and 1928. No other “mobilist” thinker went as far as Wegener to assemble evidence from different scientific fields in the service of his conception, and no other thinker has had his name more closely associated with the idea. No other proponent of continental drift had more written about his ideas, pro and con, or had as many symposia, articles, and books devoted to his ideas. From 1915 until the later 1930s the phrases “Wegener’s theory” and “continental drift” were virtually synonymous.
The parallel with Charles Darwin is suggestive. Like Wegener, Darwin wrote a book of origins: the origin of species by natural selection. No other thinker in the latter part of the nineteenth century assembled as much evidence from different scientific fields in support of the theory of evolution, or explored the matter in greater detail, or showed greater persistence in developing and refining his ideas. No other thinker had his name more closely associated with the idea of the evolution of species. To this day the phrases “Darwin’s theory” and “evolution” are virtually synonymous.
Here, however, the parallelism ends. While the term “Darwinian evolution” has managed to gather under its banner everything from Mendelian inheritance to the double helix, and while almost every evolutionary biologist in the world today would comfortably describe him- or herself as a “Darwinian,” this was not the fate of Wegener’s theory of continental drift. No earth scientist has ever, I believe, described her- or himself as “Wegenerian,” and almost none of the developers of plate tectonics saw themselves as working directly in the tradition and style of research associated with Wegener’s name.
Thus, while there is no question that the idea of continental drift belongs to Wegener every bit as much as the idea of natural selection belongs to Darwin, the investigators (working mostly after 1950) who developed the theory of plate tectonics have not chosen to see their work as a continuation of his. This is a crucial point. Discovery, however we are to define it (and it is a very complex issue), can rarely be assigned to a specific place and time and usually consists of a chain of coordinated events. Helge Kragh and Robert Smith have pointed out that “the discovery of a phenomenon (or object, or relationship) is not identical to the incorporation of the phenomenon into the body of scientific knowledge. Discovery accounts cannot be only intellectual accounts of how an idea entered a scientist’s mind, they must also include a social history of how the discovery claim became accepted by the scientific community.”10
The stipulation that a discovery account must also include the social history of the acceptance of the discovery claim by the scientific community is our key to why Wegener may be accorded priority in the theory of continental drift, but not in the theory of plate tectonics, though the latter incorporates many elements of the former. I have here written the story of Wegener’s life, including both an intellectual account of how the idea entered his mind and a social history of how that claim was treated by the scientific community during his lifetime. This social history is not equivalent to a story of acceptance, and the historical record is absolutely clear and unequivocal that Wegener’s version of continental drift was never “accepted by the scientific community.” It was never more than what he hoped it would be: a working hypothesis that accounted for most of the facts of geology, paleontology, and geophysics better than any other theory of its time, and a way of organizing work in the earth sciences which could stimulate productive research.
The question of how the scientific community came to accept the theory that the continents move has been definitively answered by Henry Frankel in his four-volume history The Continental Drift Controversy (2012).11 Frankel very appositely subtitled his first volume Wegener and the Early Debate. It begins with Wegener and traces the controversy about moving continents up to the outbreak of the Second World War. Wegener is mentioned so many times in Frankel’s first volume that the entries take up a full column of the index and are divided into multiple subheadings. By contrast, in Frankel’s second volume, Paleomagnetism and the Confirmation of Drift, which picks up the story after the Second World War, consideration of Wegener has shrunk to sixteen entries for “Wegener, Alfred” in the space of 500 pages.12 This seems to me a very clear delineation of the outcome: already by 1946 Wegener’s own theoretical construct of drift was no longer the focus of direct attention for either proponents or opponents of moving continents.
Within the realm of atmospheric physics Wegener had two lasting achievements notable enough to bear his name. The first is the theory of the formation of precipitation in cold clouds. This theory, once attributed to Tor Bergeron and W. Findeisen alone, is now correctly denominated the Wegener–Bergeron–Findeisen process, based on Bergeron’s testimony that he discovered the idea in Wegener’s Thermodynamik der Atmosphäre in 1918–1919. The second is a rare parhelion (a refracted arc adjacent to the orb of
the Sun) known as a Wegener arc.
Additionally, Wegener was among the first to discern the correct explanation for the formation of tornadoes, their relationship to a squall line of thunderstorms, and the penetration of the top of a tornado into a “supercell” within a cumulonimbus cloud. His catalog of tornadoes and waterspouts in Europe, Wind und Wasserhosen in Europa (1917), is still actively cited by tornado researchers.13
His theory of atmospheric layering, from his own standpoint one of his proudest scientific achievements, and also the inspiration for the idea of a layered solid Earth that could permit continental displacement, has not fared so well. While he was correct in determining that the stratosphere ended somewhere around 80 kilometers (50 miles) above Earth’s surface, where a new layer began (a layer now known as the mesosphere), his notion that the atmospheric layers were defined by chemical abundances successively of oxygen, nitrogen, and hydrogen has turned out to be false, as the atmosphere is well mixed up to the mesosphere. Moreover, his conjectural light element, geocoronium, does not exist, and its supposed spectral line is part of the oxygen spectrum in the very high atmosphere.
In the study of meteors, Wegener was among the first to give the correct interpretation of the color of meteor trails as an indication of the altitude of the meteor. He was also right about the craters of the Moon being impact phenomena, and “right for the right reason”—that being his morphological-empirical method of comparison of the structure of impact craters with the structure of volcanoes.
Wegener was right about many things, but being right and being important are very different things. Even in the areas of his greatest effort and interest, his work (with the exception of that on continental displacements) fell out of the citation cascade very soon after his death. Wegener had several things working against him and his legacy. Not least of these was the precipitous decline of the role of German as the international scientific language of the earth sciences in the 1920s and after. It is not generally remembered now that instruction in the German language ceased during World War I in the United States, and the language never regained its scientific prominence in this area. Between 1918 and 1950, the proportion of German language earth science publications cited in the United States fell from about 50 percent to about 5 percent. You cannot be influential if you cannot be read, and other than the third edition of his book on continents and oceans, almost nothing that he wrote was translated into any other major language until the 1970s.
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