by Ted Nield
Suess spent most of his student life in Vienna; but three years after he settled there the city was caught in the liberal revolution that swept Europe in 1848, the momentous year in which Karl Marx published The Communist Manifesto. Suess might have come from a bourgeois mercantile background but he didn’t let it hold him back; and for all his politeness to his English friends, he was no Englishman. He was a young, liberal activist mingling with others who, like him, were soon to take a decisive role in their country’s affairs, and who were of an age (and disposition) to man barricades. Suess learnt, in 1848, that the world could change, suddenly and permanently. What is more, sudden revolutions were not only possible: they could do you good. Not that it did him much good at first.
Like many things revolutionary, it started in France. The 1848 Paris revolution, which eventually led to the short-lived Second Republic, caused a run on the Vienna stock market. There was revolution in Austria-Hungary as the rising middle classes demanded change. Reformers roamed Vienna’s streets demanding the resignation of Prince Metternich, the widely hated conservative Chancellor, who ruled the Empire in place of the feeble-minded Habsburg Emperor, Ferdinand I (1793–1875). The protesters wanted such things as a free press, freedom of assembly and a national German parliament.
After trying to placate the populace with half measures, Metternich and the Emperor fled to Innsbruck. Barricades, Paris-style, were set up in Vienna’s streets – and the young Eduard Suess was on them.
As in other countries, the 1848 revolution in Austria was inconclusive. By August the Imperial family had returned. Sentiment among the ruling elite swung back, hankering after stability. The government camp rallied with the aristocracy and others keen to see the Habsburgs back in power. On 23 October 70,000 troops besieged and bombarded Vienna, against at most 40,000 rebels who included students and academics. They were doomed. No help arrived, and after three days’ fighting 2000 of them lay dead. The leaders of the uprising were rounded up and court-martialled. Nineteen were sentenced to death.
Suess who had been sent away for his own safety, now returned to Vienna and continued his studies, yet remained under suspicion, because in December 1851 he and a number of others at the Polytechnikum suspected of allegiance to the Hungarian nationalist leader Lajos Kossuth (1802–94) were arrested, subjected to court martial and imprisoned.
Suess was now in trouble. He might have remained at the Emperor’s pleasure for much longer than he did had it not been (if we are to believe some sources) for the intervention of a powerful mentor, Wilhelm von Haidinger (1795–1871), founding director of the Austrian Geological Survey, who used his influence to get his protégé freed in 1852 without indictment.
The great old geological surveys of the world mostly date from this phase of the Industrial Revolution, when governments began to realize that everything society needs that cannot be grown has to be found by a geologist. The Austrian Survey was founded in 1849 at the former Mining Museum in Heumarkt, making it one of the oldest in the world. In 1851 the geologists removed to a more prestigious address, Vienna’s Rasumovsky Palace. This gigantic pile, on what were then the outskirts of Vienna, had been built, accidentally burned down and then rebuilt, by the former Russian ambassador to the Austrian Court, Andrei Kirillovich Rasumovsky (1752–1836), now chiefly remembered as a patron of Beethoven.
Suess had published his first scientific paper in 1850 (on the mineral waters of Karlsbad) and another in 1851, the same year that Haidinger commissioned him to map sections across the Dachstein region of the eastern Alps. This work sparked Suess’s lifelong interest in the structure of mountain ranges and was to lead to one of his most lasting contributions to science. But that lay far in the future. For the time being he needed gainful employment and finally, in 1852, he secured it. It didn’t sound like much – clerk in the Imperial Geological Museum – but Suess was launched. In 1857, still only twenty-six, he completed a spectacular feat of counter-jumping by being made the first ‘extraordinary professor’ of geology at the University of Vienna. Promoted to full professor ten years later, Suess remained in post for his entire career, retiring in 1901: ‘88 semesters later’, as he was to say in his valedictory lecture.
Man of substance
Suess was no prisoner of the ivory tower. Five years after joining the professoriate he published a pamphlet lambasting the typhoid-ridden water that the Austrian capital’s citizens were forced to drink, and proposing a dramatic solution. As he later wrote in his Erinnerungen (Memories): ‘The basic principle [is] that drinking water is to be looked for outside settlements.’ Suess joined Vienna’s City Council in 1862, the year his pamphlet hit the streets. From this position he pushed forward the first Wiener Hochquellenwasserleitung – Vienna Mountain Spring Water Pipeline – which eventually solved the city’s drinking-water problem in 1873 (and is still used today).
Suess was made an honorary Burgess, Vienna’s highest civic honour. Soon afterwards he was chosen as a parliamentary representative and subsequently sat for more than thirty years in the Austrian Parliament, for three of them as leader of the Liberals, raising hackles with his forthright anticlericalism and strident denunciation of political privilege. In many ways he became the Austrian version of Britain’s Thomas Henry Huxley: a very public scientist indeed, doughty, rebellious, controversial, yet fully engaged in public works and showered with more honours than he ever accepted.
Perhaps because of his political commitments, Suess’s scientific life was not filled with the sort of relentless travelling that geologists usually indulge in. Instead he used his academic resources to survey the world from his study, with his almost unbelievably wide command of literature: from the latest research reports from the far-flung corners of the world’s great empires to the Epic of Gilgamesh. It was soon recognized across the world that no man alive could match his knowledge of the globe. Between 1885 and 1909 he distilled this unrivalled worldview in a monumental four-volume book called The Face of the Earth (Das Antlitz der Erde). Even before it was completed the Scottish geologist Sir Archibald Geikie was writing of this ‘noble philosophical poem in which the story of the continents and oceans is told by a seer gifted with rare power of insight into the past’ and of its ‘firm hold of detail combined with singularly vivid powers of generalisation’.
Oddly to modern eyes, Geikie’s long tribute to Suess (published in 1905 as the third volume was in preparation) does not mention the book’s biggest claim on history, the greatest tribute to those very vivid powers of generalization; for as early as volume one, Suess discovered and named his lost supercontinent.
Scott of Gondwana
In 1913, a year after Captain Robert Falcon Scott had frozen to death returning from their failed attempt to be first to walk to the South Pole, his second in command, Edward Evans, was returning to New Zealand aboard the Terra Nova and composing a letter to his secretary and immediate family. Scott’s legend had yet to be printed, and Evans’s letter, written before the myth of the Great British Hero stifled all criticism of the man, was frank. ‘It seems to me extraordinary that in the face of such obstacles they stuck to all their records and specimens … We dumped ours at the first big check. I must say I considered the safety of my party before the value of the records and extra stores – not eatable.’
To find out why Scott of the Antarctic died lying beside thirty-five pounds of rock, you have to go back to 1905 and a dinner he ate in Manchester in the company of a young lecturer in the University’s Department of Botany. That woman, the first female ever to be employed as an academic by the University, was Dr Marie Stopes (1880–1958).
The world knows Marie Stopes today for her later pioneering work on birth control, just as in her day the readers of Married Love or Enduring Passion assumed that she was a doctor of medicine. In fact, she held a DSc from London University and had already had a distinguished career as a palaeontologist specializing in fossil plants. Much of the research for which that degree was awarded had concerned the evolution o
f the seed. According to her biographer Keith Briant, Stopes, having met Scott at this dinner dance, quizzed him during the waltzes about his Antarctic ambitions and urged him to take both her and his own wife to the frozen continent. At the end of the dinner, following Scott’s persistent polite refusal, she is then said to have urged him, as second best, to find for her the fossils she most wanted.
Seven years later, on 20 March 1912, the exhausted Scott, Henry Bowers and chief scientist Dr Edward Adrian Wilson put up their tent against the blizzards for the last time. Their frozen bodies had to wait until 12 November to be found. The leader of the relief party, Edward Atkinson RN, wrote: ‘We recovered all their gear and dug out the sledge with their belongings on it. Amongst these were 35lb of very important geological specimens which had been collected on the moraines of the Beardmore Glacier … they had stuck to these up to the very end, even when disaster stared them in the face and they knew that the specimens were so much weight added to what they had to pull.’
However, Scott was not deceived about the importance of the geological specimens. In all, 1919 samples from the 1911–12 Antarctic adventure are now housed at the Natural History Museum in London. Most were collected by expedition geologists Raymond Priestley, Frank Debenham and T. Griffith Taylor, and come from McMurdo Sound and Terra Nova Bay. However, the ones you pick up with most trembling of the hands are those that lay for eight months beside the bodies of Scott, Wilson and Bowers just 12.66 miles south of One Ton Depot. There are samples of coal and fossil plants, and among them is the first find from the Antarctic of Glossopteris.
French geologist Adolphe Théodore Brongniart (1801–76) coined the name Glossopteris for a fossil leaf in 1828. At the time he thought he was describing part of an extinct fern. Glossopteris means ‘tongue fern’ in Greek, and its leaves are very like those of Asplenium, the familiar houseplant Hart’s Tongue Fern. However, the Glossopteris plant held quite a few surprises. First it turned out to have been a tree which grew to about eight metres; and, despite its fern-like appearance, it produced seeds. Such ‘seed ferns’ became extinct in the Triassic Period, well over 200 million years ago. Today they are studied by a few dedicated palaeobotanists, modern inheritors of Marie Stopes’s scientific interest, as they provide fascinating insights into how reproduction by seed evolved. Glossopteris, on the other hand, is a name famous among all geologists because it planted, in the mind of Eduard Suess, the first idea of Gondwanaland.
Suess painstakingly pieces together the evidence for his supercontinent. He notes in volume one that India and South Africa have many things in common. Each supported very similar sequences of rocks: ‘a mighty series of non-marine deposits which extend from the Permian to the Rhaetic … a series of similar terrestrial [fossil] floras flourished in both regions …’ Madagascar, too, shared this similarity. Finally, near the end of the first volume, Suess utters the sentence: ‘We call this mass Gondwana-Land, after the ancient Gondwana flora which is common to all its parts.’ And so the first true supercontinent was born – reborn – in the mind of Man.
A reconstruction of the Glossopteris tree.
Suess was a great coiner of words. Geologists use them all the time without realizing it. Words like sima, Tethys, Panthalassa, epeirogenesis, syntaxis and eustasy, unfamiliar to most people, have sewn Suess into the fabric of geological language. Yet even everyday speech bears him testimony. Every time we talk of ‘the biosphere’, meaning the sum total of all living things on Earth, we invoke Eduard Suess. None of his many terms, however, has caused as much etymological controversy as ‘Gondwanaland’.
Suess chose the ancient name meaning ‘Kingdom of the Gonds’. The Gonds, like the Tamils, were Dravidian peoples, and once inhabited much of what is now Madhya Pradesh, in the heart of peninsular India. Their kingdom’s name, Gondwana, had already been attached by palaeontologists to the typical fossil plants that seemed to link the now far-flung southern continents, in the term ‘Gondwana Assemblage’. For Suess ‘Gondwanaland’ meant the land whose rocks yielded this assemblage.
By the time Suess came to write his last volume, his lost supercontinent had grown to include: ‘South America from the Andes to the east coast between the Orinoco and Cape Corrientes, the Falkland islands, Africa and the southern offshoots of the Great Atlas to the Cape mountains, also Syria, Arabia, Madagascar, the Indian peninsula, and Ceylon.’ Its characteristic fossil plants had now been found in the Permian rocks of South America, South Africa, India and Australia. Once the specimens salvaged from Scott’s last tent had made it back to London, Gondwanaland would extend its dominion even further, and include the great frozen continent of Antarctica. This last fact never made it into Suess’s book, as it was first revealed in print five years after the last volume of Das Antlitz came out, in the same year that Suess died.
Though an obvious point, the main thing to remember about supercontinents is that they have vanished – for the moment. As Suess was the first to find, bringing a lost supercontinent back to life was as nothing to the problem of accounting for its disappearance. Just where did Gondwanaland go? ‘Gondwanaland was a continuous continent. Then it broke down, sometimes along extensive rectilinear fractures, into fragments,’ Suess wrote. A modern reader, encountering this with a head full of continental drift, might conclude that Suess was not only father of the supercontinent but of continental drift as well. But this would be wrong. In Suess’s worldview the Earth was shrinking inexorably as it cooled; his lost continents had sunk, like those lands of myth Atlantis, Lemuria and Mu, beneath the sea.
5
FROM OUT THE AZURE MAIN
Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every conceived notion … or you will learn nothing.
THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY
For all the eternity of the ocean, there is nothing timeless about its shoreline. Over great spans of geological time the ocean may invade large tracts of the continents and create vast, shallow seas, as it did when chalk, for example, came to be deposited over so much of the Earth. Also, ice ages pull water out of the oceans and pile it up on land, causing the global sea level to fall hundreds of metres and leaving the continental shelves (those fringes of continent temporarily covered by the sea) fully exposed.
The crust of the Earth itself also goes up and down. When I was a research student, working on the Baltic island of Gotland, I had the good fortune to know a local architect named Arne Philip who had a passion for geology. He would criss-cross the island in his MG convertible, theodolite in the back seat, making surveys of thousands of the ancient beach ridges that ring the island and all its outlying islets, recording the high-water marks achieved in the Baltic region thousands of years ago. Arne collected shelves full of data on these ‘storm beaches’ and plotted the results on gigantic maps. I do not think, however, that he ever reached any firm conclusions.
The reason is this: when ice ages end, and the heavy ice is removed after tens of thousands of years, the land recovers, just as a cushion does when you get up. The Earth, on its vast timescale at least, is soft to the touch, and this recovery has been happening in the Baltic for 10,000 years. But Arne’s problem was that his equation had (at least) two variables. At the end of the Ice Age the sea level rose globally; but locally the land was also rising where it had been covered by thick ice sheets. Gotland’s storm-beach heights were therefore a function of two unknown variables – and almost impossible to disentangle.
At least Arne knew what he was dealing with, and understood that the Baltic region is rising and why. Suess did not enjoy the benefit of such well-established explanations. In his day the relative ups and downs of crust and sea over geological time were hotly contested issues, attempted explanations for which came to occupy much of his gigantic book. This plastic quality, this mobility of the rocky crust (the very fact that, given time and sustained pressure, rocks flow), eventually proved crucial to moving beyond Suess’s contraction theory as an explanation for the break-up of Gondwanaland, and towards build
ing a truly accurate map of the supercontinent he discovered. Yet although geologists now regard as obvious this plastic behaviour of rock over long periods, most non-geologists are still quite surprised to hear how fickle the relationship between the land and sea can be: and not just in Scandinavia.
An island that went away
One day in late 2002 a mysterious volcanic island reappeared in the middle of a busy shipping lane off Sicily. A diplomatic row quickly flared over whose territory this resurgent island would be. Did previous claims still hold? Opinion was hot, strong and diverse. And caught in the middle of it were geologists: the one group that knew most, and cared least for territorial squabbles.
This speck of strategically important potential land has become known to the British as the Graham Bank volcano (and to the Italians as Isola Ferdinandea, the French as L’Isle Julia, and to various others as Nerita, Hotham, Corrao and Sciacca). Professor Antonio Zichichi, a geophysicist at the Ettore Majorano Centre in Sicily, put it simply, and perhaps with a little exasperation, when he told the Belgian newspaper Le Soir: ‘It goes up and down because the Earth’s crust goes up and down and that’s that!’ But geologists were not always so apparently uninterested in the question of the Earth’s crust’s ups and downs.
It was Enzo Boschi of Italy’s Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology who seems to have rekindled this century’s new-found interest in the Graham Bank, in an interview with Reuters, following reports of water disturbance in the area. Dr Boschi had said the volcano might erupt ‘in a few weeks or months’. This quote quickly spread through the online media and resulted in a thoughtful feature by Rose George in the UK newspaper the Independent. Then the whole thing went quiet for a month, until the Italian Naval League reawakened the story by demanding that Italy do something to prevent perfidious Albion (or any other foreign nation) from stealing their island again.