Alfred Wegener

by Mott T. Greene

  Trolle put the plan to work immediately. The materials for the hut would have to be cut and packed, food and fuel apportioned, and a coal stove fabricated, all of this to be accomplished by the otherwise restive crew. Meanwhile, Wegener doggedly pursued his electrical and magnetic measurements, and with the aid of the automobile-driven winch, he managed a kite flight almost every third day in August, reaching a total of sixty ascents for the year before the end of the month.41 Meanwhile, the waning of the light and the coming of winter led to an interesting and delicate calculation concerning the construction of the inland weather station. It would be ideal to have the hut finished before the ground froze, but the transport of materials would be much eased by the ability to travel on the ice, rather than overland. This indicated a window of opportunity in the first half of September.

  On 25 August Wegener and Trolle set off on foot along the shore to reconnoiter ice conditions at Storm Bay (10 kilometers [6 miles] distant) and Hvalrosødden (20 kilometers [12 miles] further along). If the ice conditions were favorable, the Mørke Fjord Expedition (as it was grandly overtitled) could avoid much rough terrain and cut across the new ice at both these locations. They returned on 31 August, and Trolle gave orders for the “expedition” to set out the next day.42

  On 8 September the “expedition” party returned, having got only as far as the hook in the coast known as Snenaes, barely a third of the distance to Mørke Fjord. There a great quarrel had broken out. If the ice conditions were good enough to transport stores to the west, argued one party, they were good enough to support a rescue expedition to find Mylius, Hagen, and Brønlund in the North. This group therefore refused to proceed further, insisted on dumping the stores intended for Mørke Fjord, and forced the entire party to return to Danmarkshavn. Wegener could barely contain his fury and disappointment, turning to his diary for release:

  The Mørkefjord expedition has returned after having carried the materials for the station the least distance possible—as far as Snenäs.… That’s how it is with these people! Now it will be impossible to build the house before the ground freezes. Their anarchistic relations with one another have a destructive effect on every cooperative endeavor. When left alone to do their individual work everything is fine. But as soon as it is a matter of working together, everything falls apart, everyone does what his own head tells him to, no one does anything except what he wants, no one submits his own preferences to the needs of the others.43

  Perhaps they were really worried about Mylius; maybe they just wanted to do what they wanted to do. In any case, a meeting was held, after which a relief expedition with six sleds was sent north. Over the next forty days they would suffer terribly, starve and freeze, kill or ruin a large number of dogs, and accomplish nothing—being met by just what Koch said they would meet: open water at Mallemukfjeld, the same open water that was keeping Mylius and his companions in the North. Koch had quite pointedly declined to go.

  Maybe those that went north were the lucky ones. The depression of the winter night came early that fall to everyone at Danmarkshavn, even before the darkness was complete. It hovered over them on the wings of their own fear of it, sapping their will to work. Wegener felt it come over him:

  We all suffer in the same way from the endless uniformity and the lack of sensory input. In the mornings we are unbelievably sleepy, and have too little desire for work. Even though I am continually occupied by my tasks, I must admit to myself that I accomplish unbelievably little work. What one accomplishes, feels, sees, discusses here in the course of a week, one could do, feel, see, and discuss at home in the course of a day, without needing even to hurry. I think the only thing we work at harder here than at home is sleeping. And yet Koch and I must count ourselves as among the most active here of all the expedition members, and I am very steady in making my observations, indeed am ridiculous enough as a model of bustle, yet I am all the while acutely conscious that I am doing shamefully little.44

  After working all day at his own measurements, he took to assisting Koch in the astronomical work. None of this was actually essential—it was Koch’s own way of fighting the inertial drag of winter night. They did surveying work by day, to check the accuracy of the leveling apparatus, and by night pursued measurements of stars to determine the coefficient of refraction of the night air under different conditions. It was all, as Wegener admitted, a form of therapy, a “patent medicine”—anything to keep active. They rebuilt the kite-house, the one destroyed in the August storm. They cooked up a “24-hour observation expedition” in which Koch, Lindhard, Freuchen, and Wegener stayed up for twenty-four hours on 12–13 September making air-electrical, temperature, and astronomical measurements, drinking so much coffee in the process that the Greenlanders dubbed it an “observation party” (Observations-Mik) after their own tradition of a Kaffee-Mik.45

  During all this time, nothing was happening toward the construction of the inland weather station. Dog food was in short supply, and many of the best dogs were off in the north with the relief expedition. In later September it finally snapped cold, and the ice began to form in earnest. Someone had the bright idea that the motorcar, heretofore employed only as a kite winch, might be good for something more. On 25 September, Freuchen, Hakon Jarner, and Ivar Weinschenck took off on the ice hauling an empty sledge, with the idea of transporting the construction materials the rest of the way to Mørke Fjord with this mechanical contraption. It began as something of a lark, but their rate of progress astounded them. They arrived at Snenaes in a few hours—a day’s slog by foot or dogsled—loaded the sledge, and hauled everything to Hvalrosødden. The next day they set out and once again covered an amazing distance—halting at the mouth of the Mørke Fjord only because they could see open water ahead inside the narrow fjord.

  Greenland’s first auto trip was followed immediately by its first auto accident. Weinschenck got stuck in a snowdrift on the way back to Kap Bismarck and had to abandon the car and sledge. The car was buried in snow and was not seen again until the end of November: it had fallen through the ice and sunk to the bottom—a total loss.

  Somehow, in spite of this and other mishaps, miscalculations, and a good deal of stormy weather, the station got built over the course of the next month. Wegener took no part in the building or provisioning and had become quite fatalistic about it—either they would get it done or they would not. He stayed at Danmarkshavn and sent up kite after kite, though he was by now down to his last working kite meteorograph.46 When, by the first of October, Mørke Fjord had not yet frozen over, Gundahl Knudsen (1876–1948), the ship’s carpenter, made the decision to build the station in a narrow bight just to the south of where the last piles of lumber for the hut had been dropped—a place christened Pustervig (wind gap). From Wegener’s perspective, this was an unfortunate spot, as it sat in the lee of the Monumentberg, which blocked the prevailing wind from the northwest. It was, moreover, 15 kilometers (9 miles) seaward from the end of the fjord, where the station was supposed to have been, and thus almost 25 kilometers (16 miles) from the ice margin.

  When Wegener arrived with the meteorological instruments in early November, he found his assistant, Peter Freuchen, already snug in his cabin at Pustervig. The place was so well set up and provisioned that Wegener could almost forget about the unfortunate location. Over the next few days he compared the weather in Mørke Fjord, on the other side of Monumentberg, with that at Pustervig, trying to get a feel for the temperature and wind differences. There was no way around it—in order to make the station work and get any significant data, Freuchen (or whoever else staffed the station) would have to climb the Monumentberg every day and take a temperature reading at 400 and 800 meters (1,312 and 2,625 feet). Wegener set up the temperature measurement locations and climbed the mountain several times on 6 and 7 November to mark out the path.

  Wegener’s ascent of the Monumentberg on 7 November coincided with the arrival of a föhn wind. As he stood on the tabular summit of the mountain, he had one of those experie
nces that made his Greenland journey seem worth all the effort, anxiety, and frustration. As the northwest wind swept up the mountain on the Mørke Fjord side, a “föhn wall” formed at the edge of the summit plateau, a line of precipitating clouds parallel to the axis of the mountain. As the clouds arched up and over the summit, they thinned and began to dissipate as they descended on the Pustervig side. This was a thermodynamics text come to life. Bezold (and many others) believed that the warmth of the föhn wind was caused by the adiabatic compression of descending dry air—the air having lost its water vapor by condensation and precipitation on the windward side. The heat generated in compressing dry air is familiar to anyone who has ever held the shaft of a bicycle pump. Wegener’s temperature measurements on the descent from the mountain showed a stronger-than-expected temperature increase. It was an amazing stroke of luck. Now he could alert Freuchen to the phenomenon and get many more records of the same sort.47

  Observer’s hut at Pustervig (“wind gap”), where Wegener’s assistant Peter Freuchen spent the winter of 1907/1908. In the background is the Monumentberg that Freuchen had to ascend each day to make observations. Wegener stayed here in the summer of 1908, alone. This is Wegener’s photo to document the parhelia of the Sun’s light refracted through ice crystals. From Friis, Im Grönlandeis mit Mylius-Erichsen.

  Freuchen, who was left entirely alone with the departure of Wegener and the others on the eighth, paid the price, in the course of the following winter, for the station’s poor location. The harshness of the conditions, however, and the dangers of the work were more than anyone had counted on. Freuchen kept a team of seven dogs with him, but because these could not come into the small hut, one by one they were killed and eaten by the large white polar wolves that frequented this valley. These wolves followed Freuchen in the darkness when he climbed the Monumentberg to make his daily temperature measurements, a trip that never took less than four hours. Though he would spend most of the next twenty years in Greenland, his fear and hatred of wolves, developed in these few months, never left him. The mountain was slippery with ice, and he risked his life each day simply climbing a prearranged path. At Christmas Wegener sent him a puppy for company, and in January a set of crampons (ice teeth fitted to the bottom of a boot) to make his ascents of the mountain safer, but poor Freuchen had a bad time of it nonetheless. Condensation from his breath inside the hut froze to the walls, producing an ice shell more than 1 foot (0.3 meters) thick on all interior surfaces.48

  Supplying coal and food for Pustervig became a major struggle for the expedition. Like much of what one learns on any expedition, it was mostly an example of what not to do. There wasn’t enough game in the vicinity of Kap Bismarck to make food for the dogs needed for the supply runs (“don’t build an expedition around hunting”). The ice conditions in winter 1907–1908 were terrible, with open water in January along the coast going west to Pustervig (“don’t plan to have last year’s ice conditions”). It was necessary to travel to Pustervig every other week, because of the need to supply Freuchen with coal (“never, ever heat a remote hut with coal!”). The wolves were a nightmare for the supply teams throughout the winter night, attacking the dogs of the coal and provision sleds at every camping stop. The indomitable Greenlander Hendrik Olsen, leaping from his tent at Hvalrosødden to break up a fight among his dogs, found himself one winter night plying the whip to the snout of a huge arctic wolf in the midst of the fray.49

  Back at Danmarkshavn, things were not much better. If Wegener, by his own assessment, was wintering better in the second year, the same could not be said for many of the Danmark staff and crew. The early November return of the expedition to the north in search of Mylius had produced no news of any kind. The end of this hopeful effort, with the would-be rescuers sick and exhausted, their dogs ruined, their sleds broken and worthless, depressed everyone at Danmarkshavn. Wegener returned from Pustervig on 11 November to find a bleak mood everywhere.

  One bright spot was his ability to interest Gustav Thostrup and Aage Bertelsen in a program to make the study of the auroras (Polarlicht) more useful. Earlier Wegener had fretted about a way to represent them. He and Thostrup decided on a polar projection using the station zenith as the center and the horizon as the outer (circular) border and plotted the auroras on a star chart (the easiest way to locate their position). Because the color could be used to infer the composition of the ionized gases, Wegener was overjoyed to have Bertelsen paint the aurora on a stretched canvas.

  Wegener wrote to Freuchen on 12 November, asking him “if he had the time and the energy” to observe the aurora, noting the direction, elevation above the horizon, and time, and to make a sketch of its shape. He urged him to make a star map of his own and to plot the course and shape of the aurora in “three or four sketches, as it goes through the different phases of its development (e.g. before it gets to the zenith, one in the zenith with a corona, and finally after it passes) this would be very useful material.”50

  Wegener was interested in the aurora as a beautiful display and photographed it many times. He was also interested in what caused it, and his work shows that he was on the winning side in the interpretation—ionization of atmospheric gases by a flux of solar radiation. His observation program—assembled with such difficulty because the expedition members (a) didn’t know what they were doing or why and (b) didn’t like freezing in the polar darkness doing what they were not required to do and did not understand—had nevertheless a chance to make a real contribution.

  When he could get everyone on board, and he did occasionally, he could chart the course of the aurora, get measurements of the variations in atmospheric electricity as it passed overhead, record the declination of the magnetic field using the magnetic theodolite, get Bertelsen to record its colors in paint, and, with Freuchen’s observations of the same zenith passage 60 kilometers (37 miles) distant, have a baseline long enough to get a quite reliable estimate of the altitude. Excited by the usefulness of these results, he urged Freuchen again and again to measure the aurora whenever possible. On more than one occasion, Freuchen and Wegener were able to see the curtain from the aurora descend below the elevation of the Monumentberg and to measure its approach to the ground—even though such accounts are still disputed.51

  Though he had wanted to spend Christmas with Freuchen, he had to beg off. It was the time of year when everyone had to report the results of their work from the preceding year. Wegener had done a tremendous amount of work, and that meant “a frightful amount of writing (to cover the eventuality that I don’t make it back from the expedition).”52 At the request of Achton Friis, he copied out extracts from his journals, especially of the trip to the north, and produced for Friis a twenty-page manuscript (translated into Danish) summarizing the principal meteorological findings of the expedition.53

  When the New Year came, Wegener, as a gesture of solidarity and achieving a long-sought goal, began to keep his diary partly in Danish. This would also save copying and translating later on. He had been able to converse a little in Danish for some months; though he kept his instrument records in German, his correspondence with Freuchen at Pustervig alternated between Danish and German, and he seems to have acquired a mastery of the language.

  His increasing comprehension of what was being said gave him a deeper insight into the dynamics of the expedition. Much of what he had assumed the year before to be spirited conversation turned out, when one understood it, to be bitter argumentation. There was no deep animosity in play, simply boredom and confinement. “It is terrible,” wrote Wegener, “when men accustomed to hard work have neither any work nor anything to interest them. The result is an endless succession of quarrels.”54 Were he in charge of an expedition (a frequent and favorite winter reverie), he would pay close attention to keeping his men occupied in the winter. They should have a slide projector along, and the scientists should commit themselves to giving illustrated lectures, or there should be prepared courses of study that could be accomplished while cooped
up indoors.55

  The boredom of winter was wearing on Wegener, too. “My circumstance, my position in the expedition, is working out very unfavorably. I haven’t held a dog whip in my hand since Mylius took me with him to the north. And this spring will bring not a hint of novel personal experience.”56 One need not take this too seriously: he had reached his winter nadir the same day in the previous year. His fear of underemployment had the same consequence as the year before—he turned to long reveries of future expeditions. He had already planned the South Pole expedition extensively; now he thought about crossing the Greenland ice cap. It would be a small expedition—himself and another European if they used man-hauled sledges, with Hendrik Olsen along if they chose to use dogs. The more he thought about it, the less he liked it, though. “There isn’t much in this preliminary plan to tempt me. The autumn would be fast and stimulating, but then there would be a long overwintering, and the traverse itself would be a mindless grind [Stumpfsinn]. Nevertheless, on practical grounds I can’t help thinking that it has a lot to recommend it.”57

  Perhaps Wegener discussed his inland-ice plan with Koch, though his diary does not record it. It is an interesting coincidence, in any case, that Koch assigned Wegener to make a month-long sledge trip in March with Aage Bertelsen, Weinschenck, and the expedition’s doctor, Jens Lindhard (1870–1947), to investigate the snow- and ice-free land that had been observed on the far side of the great tongue of the Inland Ice, Storestrømmen, which bordered Germania Land to the west. This trip would be man hauled (no dogs), as had been the journey to carry the instruments to Pustervig in the previous November.