Alfred Wegener

by Mott T. Greene

  Reviewing their researches in Dronning Louise Land, they realized how much more they might have accomplished with more time. The death of Mylius-Erichsen had thrown the entire schedule of the last year of the expedition into chaos. Part of the expedition plan had always been a traverse of the Inland Ice from east to west. This would have been the first traverse in thirty years—the first since the pioneering effort of Fridtjof Nansen (1861–1930) in 1888. The scientific program proposed by Nansen after his trek across the Inland Ice had been the inspiration for the Danmark Expedition plan to venture there, but it still remained completely undeveloped and unexploited.

  Koch proposed to Wegener that they should go back to East Greenland, as soon as they could raise the money. Even as they were talking, Ejnar Mikkelsen (1880–1971) and a party of Danes were in Northeast Greenland searching for the remains of Mylius-Erichsen and Høeg-Hagen, to recover their lost diaries.11 Koch knew that these men would be traveling in his own footsteps, as well as the route that Wegener and Thostrup had taken over the edge of the Inland Ice: Mikkelsen’s expedition plan included a reconnaissance onto the Inland Ice past Dronning Louise Land. This could only be a prelude to an attempted crossing. De Quervain and others were known to be planning traverses of the ice cap, but this task and achievement, Koch felt, belonged to him and to Wegener. It is what they had talked about and dreamed of in their bunks at their “Villaen” while on the Danmark Expedition. Wegener had confided, several times in his diary, how much he despised the organizational scheme of the Danmark Expedition, in which everyone had a maddening series of everyday duties in addition to their scientific work, and which over time, and in the polar dark, had whittled away at the residual energy to think and do science.

  What was needed was a small, compact, highly mobile expedition, with Wegener, Koch, and their old friend and companion the botanist Andreas Lundager as the scientists, along with one nonscientist helper. Koch excitedly sketched out a plan. It was Nansen who provided the template: he had done all the pioneering work and made all the mistakes. His account of the first crossing of the Greenland ice cap, east to west, is one of the most heroic and most comic stories in all of polar exploration. It was dangerous, it was grueling, but it wasn’t tragic, and no one died.

  Nansen was the great polar explorer of the turn of the century, before the poles were achieved. His book The First Crossing of Greenland (1890)—in the original Norwegian, Paa Ski over Grønland (By Skis across Greenland), and in German Auf Schneeschuhen durch Grönland (1897)—was a huge best seller.12 It was famous, not least of all, for introducing skiing to the world outside Norway. A good part of the book is given up to the praise of the wonders of skiing and skiing technique: we are speaking of cross-country here, not downhill. It is difficult from our vantage point to imagine that scarcely a century ago almost no one outside Norway ever considered strapping long narrow boards onto his or her feet as a means of traversing snowy countryside, but this is very much the case. Nansen was a great apostle of skiing, which sport he had begun at age four in 1865, and also a great ice skater and a good shot. He was a zoologist who dropped out of school in 1882 to go to sea as a seal shooter, and his ship had been caught in the ice off East Greenland. It was at this time that he got the idea to cross the ice cap from east to west.

  A previous attempt to cross the ice cap had been made in 1883 by A. E. Nordenskjold (1832–1901), the great Finnish/Swedish polar explorer whose voyage of the Vega, with his navigation of the Northeast Passage from Norway to the Bering Strait from 1878 to 1880, was also one of the great classics of polar exploration. Nordenskjold had failed in his own attempt to cross the ice from west to east, but he had encouraged Nansen to attempt the crossing, and he also encouraged him to take Lapps with him because of their experience in the ice and snow environment.

  Nansen had picked a small party: himself; Otto Sverdrup (1854–1930), who was later captain of the Fram; Oluf Dietrichson (1856–1942), a lieutenant in the Norwegian army who was there to do the meteorology and cartography; Kristian Kristiansen Trana (1865–?), a lumberjack and deckhand who had worked for Sverdrup’s father; and two Lapps, Samuel Balto (twenty-seven years old) and Ole Ravna (forty-six).

  Technologically, in the history of polar exploration, the trip was a transition between a British boat-sledge haul and later sled-sledge expeditions. Nansen used no dogs or ponies, with an emphasis on lightweight and fast movement. Nansen and his companions learned a number of painful lessons.

  They learned that traveling in July and August was a big mistake, because the snow toward the coast was melting and knee-deep, while the high-ice snow was a wind-driven substance the consistency of beach sand and no easier to ski on or to draw sleds over. They had no ski wax, and they had iron-shod sleds. Every step was a tremendous effort from one side of Greenland to the other. They learned that it would have been useful to have a thermometer that would register below −40°C (−40°F), to take clothes that would keep snow out, and to take a tent that would do the same. They learned that you have to take a lot of fat. They were starved for fat and wolfed down their weekly butter ration.13 They learned that you need to carry enough fuel to melt snow so that you are not constantly dehydrated, and they learned that without this additional fuel you must wait to eat until your beard thaws, because it freezes so hard that you can’t open your mouth.14 It is for the latter reason that most polar explorers learned to stay clean-shaven or to have very short beards.

  Nansen’s crossing of Greenland was a major step in the exploration of the interior. From the 1860s onward, beginning with the work of Johannes Rink (1819–1893), there was an attempt to use Greenland as a laboratory for determining the reality and character of continental glaciations and therefore of ice ages. Nansen had been very keen to study the latter problem, especially the calculation of the ice volume disgorged from glaciers.15 Nansen’s account of his crossing of Greenland ended with a brief scientific appendix, containing an agenda of problems concerning the Inland Ice of Greenland, which occupies polar scientists even today.

  The program that Nansen had laid out was the program that Koch and Wegener proposed to follow. There were the geographical questions: What is the altitude and extent of the ice surface? Does the ice cap contain substantial outcrops of rocky material, or is the latter mostly absent? Are there more rocky islands like Dronning Louise Land, nunatak oases in the desert of ice? Were there any transverse channels connecting the East and the West? Then there were also glaciological questions: What was the profile of the ice surface? What was the nature of the crevasses and fissures, what was its rate of motion, what was the glaciological topography, what was the composition of the ice and snow, and what changes in its temperature and structure with depth? Then there were the meteorological questions: What were the temperature and pressure regimes in the interior? Was it too cold to snow there? Was there a permanent glacial anticyclone? (The winds appeared to blow always toward the coast.)16

  These were all good scientific questions, questions that might be answered in the course of the traverse they were contemplating. They would have a fighting chance: they would start farther north than Nansen had begun and cross a much longer diagonal from northeast to southwest of perhaps 700 kilometers (435 miles). This traverse would take them right across the geographical center of this gigantic island, so that if there were anything “in the middle of Greenland” they would be likely to find it.

  What was more exciting about following in Nansen’s footsteps was that he was not only a great polar traveler but also a real scientist with real scientific plans. Nansen’s agenda for Greenland was not limited to just the questions given above but included some engrossing “higher order” questions. Greenland contained the last remnant of the continental ice sheets of the last Northern Hemisphere glaciation. It also contained fossils—not merely of temperate plants and coal deposits, but identifiable fossils of tropical plants. Somewhere in Greenland, Nansen was convinced, was the solution to the riddle of the ice ages.

 
Nansen had thought a great deal about the cause of ice ages, and he knew the wide variety of geographical theories. He was also familiar with the astronomical theories: both the theory of long-term cooling of Earth from an earlier warm state and James Croll’s theory that the changes in the eccentricity of Earth’s orbit would lead to variations in solar radiation and thus alternate warming and cooling of the Northern and Southern Hemispheres. Nansen rejected all these explanations for a variety of very good reasons, which we need not go into here,17 in favor of a much more attractive and persuasive alternative: the migration of Earth’s pole of rotation. “The easiest method of explaining a glacial epoch as well as the occurrence of warmer climates at one latitude or another is to imagine a slight change in the geographical position of Earth’s axis. If, for instance, we could move the North Pole down to some point near the West Coast of Greenland between 60° and 65° north latitude we could no doubt produce a glacial period in both Europe and America.”18

  Greenland superimposed on Europe, showing the route planned (in 1911) by Koch and Wegener across Greenland for 1912–1913. The blackened area at the top of the map is Denmark. From J. P. Koch, Gennem den Hvide Ørken: Den danske Forskningsrejse tvaers over Nordgrønland 1912/13 (Kjøbenhavn: Gyldendalske Boghandel Nordisk Forlag, 1913).

  The Arctic explorer and paleobotanist Alfred Nathorst (1850–1921) had documented the existence of floras in Japan (cold-weather plants) and Greenland (tropical plants) at exactly the same time in the Tertiary: this would be impossible with Earth’s axis in its present position, and Nathorst had proposed a position for the pole of Earth at 70° north and 120° east, 20° nearer Siberia than at present.19 These findings supplemented the publications of the great Swiss paleobotanist Oswald Heer (1809–1883), who had done extensive work on tertiary fossils of North Greenland and come to the conclusion that the mean temperature for these regions in part of the Tertiary must have been between 21°C (70°F) and 22°C (72°F).20 Heer had created a sensation with his Urwelt der Schweiz (1865), with its striking engravings of tropical plants growing in Switzerland in earlier periods.21

  Nansen continued, “That an actual movement of the axis does take place seems to have been established by the fact that observations of several German observatories, Berlin, Potsdam, Strasburg, and Prague agree remarkably in showing alteration of more than half a second in the course of six months.”22 Indeed, the observations taken at Pulkova, Greenwich, Washington, Milan, and Naples seemed to indicate a motion of the pole beyond the simple nutation, which additional motion could displace Earth’s axis as much as one second per year.

  My idea, therefore is that, if it be allowed that the axis of the earth can admit of considerable changes of position, there is nothing to be said against the hypothesis that several of these changes may have taken place within the bounds of Tertiary time … but even if it be granted that the pole had a different position in the Tertiary period, there still remains the fact that it must have moved twice over towards Greenland, and twice back again, to account for the two different glacial periods. Such movements would be, no doubt, somewhat extravagant and no sufficient reasons for their occurrence are forthcoming.23

  Whether such displacements of Earth’s pole were “extravagant” or not, Nansen continued to support this hypothesis over that of the astronomical theory of James Croll, which, he thought, had the defect that while “it will furnish us with glacial periods returning at indefinite intervals, it cannot account for the recurrence of conditions so favorable as to explain the existence of subtropical climates, such as Greenland, for instance must once have had. Thus we see that from whatever point of view we regard the phenomena we cannot find any satisfactory explanation that covers them all. This must be the work of the future.”24

  Koch and Wegener planned to take up Nansen’s challenge: their work would be “the work of the future” foretold by Nansen. They sketched a plan to arrive in Greenland, in the vicinity of Danmarkshavn, in the autumn of 1912 and to erect a prefabricated hut of the kind they had stayed in from 1906 to 1908, wintering over on the margin of the Inland Ice, so that all their supplies would actually be on the ice cap before the attempted traverse the following spring. They might, under other circumstances, have made use of the buildings, including the Villaen, at Danmarkshavn, except that it was possible that Mikkelsen’s party would still be in the vicinity as late as 1912.

  After the overwintering, they would make the traverse of the ice cap in April, May, and June of 1913. They would need a lot of equipment and a lot of fuel, and the initial estimate was some 20,000 kilograms (44,092 pounds). This meant that both dogs and man-hauled sledges were out of the question: a fully loaded dogsled was only a payload of about 100 kilograms (220 pounds), and this would require 200 trips and many more dogs than four men could handle. Koch proposed that they use Icelandic ponies, Hyster or (in Danish) Hestene. He had used them in his cartographic work in Iceland, and although they made traveling slower than with dogsleds, their pulling power was enormously greater than a span of dogs. Horse-drawn sleds, equipped with sails when the wind direction was right, could provide the motive power needed. Indeed, Ernest Shackleton (1874–1922) was at that time (1908–1909) using them in Antarctica.

  Koch would go back to Denmark to try to raise the money. The Carlsberg Foundation could be counted on for perhaps 30,000 kroner, about half of what they would need, but Koch would have to do some aggressive fund-raising to make up the rest. If Wegener was to be a full partner in the expedition (Selbststandig), he would have to raise a good deal of money too. He could appeal to the German government for a stipend, common practice for expedition members whose work was deemed important and for the good of the country. It was a long shot, but it was something that they both wanted. Wegener committed to go, and he saw Koch off at the train and then returned to work—not “his work,” but just work. He had a bare month to finish the scaled-down version of his thermodynamics book for Abderhalden, plus the endless data reduction of the weather station observations at Danmarkshavn. Wegener was fortunate that, although he had no great mathematical gift, very much like Johannes Kepler, he took an aesthetic pleasure in calculating and reducing numerical data; it put his mind at rest. This appetite for data reduction and calculation was something that he shared with Köppen, who enjoyed working far into the night with numerical data bearing on whatever problem with which he was currently occupied, liking the quiet of the house once everyone else had gone to sleep.

  A Dilemma

  No sooner had Koch departed than Köppen arrived, having told Wegener that he wanted to visit him for a day or two. Wegener was delighted and spoke excitedly about Koch’s visit and the return home of his brother Kurt.25 The documentary evidence is very incomplete here, but working backward from letters between Wegener and Köppen later in 1911, it appears that Köppen had come to Marburg to offer Wegener a position as an atmospheric physicist at the German Marine Observatory in Hamburg, where they might be colleagues. Köppen was one of several German scientists approached by Hugo Hergesell in 1909 and 1910 to take a role within Germany, generously funded by the Carnegie Institution of Washington, D.C., to turn meteorology into an atmospheric physics. This was an explicit program of the Carnegie Institution in coordination with the U.S. Weather Bureau—although funded almost entirely by Carnegie—to make resources available to investigators in America, Britain, and Germany that they might order, modernize, and scientize the understanding of atmospheric motions. Vilhelm Bjerknes was to be part of this effort, as was Aßmann.26

  Köppen seems to have pressed Wegener very strongly to take this job. The amount of money was quite substantial, a $2,000 U.S. grant per year to Köppen and Wegener for three years, to work on that aspect of the international network of observing stations being built in preparation for large-scale air travel. Although currency conversion isn’t an exact science, $2,000 U.S. in 1912 had the purchasing power of about $45,000 today. Köppen proposed that Wegener should have the lion’s share of this money, should he com
e to Hamburg. Köppen already had an adequate salary and was well settled, and Bjerknes and others had used their grants immediately in order to hire assistants.27

  Writing to Köppen on 2 May, Wegener said, “You surely know how to pour hot coals on my head.”28 Köppen, who was a respected meteorologist but best known as a climatologist, had said to Wegener that he thought of him as a climatologist and a geographer as well. Wegener replied that he heard this quite a bit about himself, and that if everybody said this of him he might come eventually to believe it, but that fundamentally it wasn’t true. He wanted to take meteorology in the direction of physics. “It’s likely,” he said, “that I could produce climatological and geographical work, if I applied myself to it with a great deal of energy and I could come somewhat closer to the ideas of these sciences … but would it work?”29

  Wegener had told Köppen of the planned Greenland expedition, and Köppen had made his reservations evident. Perhaps in an attempt to put his mind at ease, Wegener told him that “the Greenland expedition is quite up in the air especially the way it is to be organized. Probably it will again be a Danish expedition in which I will be a member.”30

  At the beginning of May, and probably on the same day that he wrote to Wladimir Köppen, he wrote to Else: he was in parallel correspondence with the father and the daughter. He had delighted her earlier in April with a description of a hair-raising crash and destruction of the balloon “Marburg,” while he was piloting it. This was the balloon that he, Richarz, and Stuchtey had used for a variety of scientific purposes. The balloon, on the day of the disaster, had not been sufficiently loaded with ballast, and in consequence it was slightly underinflated. It failed to clear a ridge and had been caught in and shredded by tall trees. Wegener was knocked about but not badly injured. With that disaster behind him, he invited Else to come to Marburg for a balloon ride, perhaps a questionable invitation given the context. Nevertheless, she was thrilled. She would have to provide 100 marks as her share of the cost of the ride. He told her he had asked a married couple that he knew (probably Oberlehrer Brand and his wife) to go for a balloon flight and needed a “fourth man.” He would be delighted if Else would come to Marburg and fly with him. As it turned out, Brand’s wife fell ill, and the flight had to be canceled. Else was severely disappointed, but Wegener told her that he would come to see her in Hamburg at the beginning of June instead.31