Alfred Wegener
Page 44
Whatever his day-to-day activities, the long-term uncertainty about his future had now returned, if not with a vengeance, at least with an insistence he could not avoid. Köppen had written him a letter shortly after 21 November offering a range of options about when, and under what circumstances, they should begin their collaborative work for the Carnegie Institution on advances in aerology. With this range of options of dates, Köppen had also included a draft contract for Wegener to sign, so that he might transmit this back to Carnegie for their approval. Wegener responded with the longest letter of their correspondence thus far.
The wild card here was his on-again, off-again expedition to Greenland with Koch. He wrote to Köppen,
I am reluctant to return my already completed contract until I get Koch’s answer to my question of how things now stand. You know that his expedition with only four men depends entirely on who they are, and I cannot behave so contemptibly as to leave him in the lurch … if he gives up, or if there is no end in sight I will send you my contract immediately.… I have gone to a good deal of trouble to sort through the various different proposals that you have offered. Finally, I have cut the knot and in the end decided: the beginning for the two of us should be 1 October 1912.51
Köppen was on the brink of retirement from the Deutsche Seewarte (German Marine Observatory) and had wanted his collaboration with Wegener to coincide with that date. Moving their collaboration forward to a fixed date the following year, as Wegener saw it, would allow Köppen to retire whenever he wished, as well as give them both a lot of time to map out the work. He was particularly concerned that the contract should contain a stipulation that if one or the other of them was forced by other commitments to reduce the scope of his labor for the Carnegie Institution (in other words, should the Greenland trip actually happen), then that person could get out of the contract and have someone else complete it. His suffering with the Danmark Expedition and its aftermath had taught him a good deal about what to ask for.
“For me,” Wegener continued,
the most pressing question is when I should come to Hamburg. Today I spoke with a number of acquaintances, and with their help have clarified matters. They have one and all warned me against leaving here without having a similar academic position waiting for me there. If I did, I would then be between two stools. A move from here without “rehabilitating” is equivalent to surrendering any chance that I might gain the title “professor.” … I would have given up one position without having gained another … it is important that I remain here, above all, in case I get a “call” [to a professorship] or something else like this happens and this plan also has the advantage that I will be able in this period of time not just to read my way through but to learn an excellent little reference library of physics, chemistry, and geophysics, and I need to have this in place for the remaining volumes of my physics of the atmosphere.52
“I don’t have to tell you,” Wegener added, “that a joint work would be every bit as stimulating for me as it would be for you. And you’ve made the point that when we are together everything goes forward with greater clarity. Surely you can still remember the amateurish bungling of the first draft of my thermodynamics.”53
There were many arguments against the move to Hamburg, one argument for; then, upon returning to arguments against once more, he added an interesting twist: “In spite of the scientific facilities that Hamburg offers, I prefer Marburg as a refuge from the big city, for which my nerves, like those of my siblings, simply are not ‘calibrated.’ It is a great defect [of my character] but I have such an overwhelming need for quiet—maybe will happen that I can also, in Hamburg, find a quiet little place.”54
Else Köppen had contrasted Kurt’s nervousness with Alfred’s calm, but this calm was an exterior calm with which he could conceal an inner turmoil. In saying that had “an overwhelming need for quiet,” he was talking about not simply what he needed to work but what he needed to live comfortably. Wegener’s emotional repertoire was certainly limited. He wrote to Köppen, “Ich habe immer Furcht von dem Pathos” (I have always been afraid of excessive shows of emotion). Apparently there did not have to be much emotion for it to be too much for Wegener. He was perhaps not an unusual specimen in this regard.
He was physically strong and courageous, but he had lived in a world composed solely of professional relationships and “comradeship,” with the exception of his immediate family. Like many highly intellectual men, faced with a situation or a crisis that actually called for some expression of feelings, he was likely to respond either with verbosity (as in this longest letter ever to Köppen) or with depression. He was trying, in his letter to Köppen, to resolve his anxiety in his divided feelings by multiplying the reasons for staying at Marburg. The truth is, he was not just reluctant to leave but somewhat afraid. Of what? Perhaps he was afraid to be swallowed up by Köppen’s concerns and his world, afraid to lose his freedom of action and thought, afraid to abandon his academic career, afraid to give up his chance at another polar exploration, and probably afraid of his impending marriage to some extent as well.
I believe that we’ll have to leave the time of my move to Hamburg open for a while. For the summer semester [of 1912], I have proposed [a course titled] “Dynamic Behavior of the Atmosphere” (vol. II of Phys. Der A.!) and I believe it will be very useful to me when I carried it through, if you would also read it. By October 1, when my lectures [for the winter semester] begin, we may be able to see more clearly what is going to happen … you wrote to me that Else will probably remain home until Christmas 1912, and could probably get married by Easter [1913]. That is just over 5/4 of a year but perhaps it can’t be any sooner.55
So there was the dénouement: he would not sign the contract, he would not move, and he would not marry until the spring of 1913. This last decision was important to him, as he had committed himself to Koch on the understanding that the polar expedition must happen in 1912/1913 or not at all.
Chance and a Prepared Mind
With all of this resting on whether or not the Greenland trip would come off or not, Alfred had to assume that it would, however low the chances seemed at any moment. If it were to happen, he would already have to be scientifically prepared to investigate the glaciology and geology they would encounter. Of course, nothing scientific had ever been done with regard to Northeast Greenland, save by himself and other members of the Danmark Expedition. So he focused his attention instead on Iceland. Koch had mapped Iceland, including its southern ice cap Vatnajøkul. It was their plan, should they obtain funding, to train themselves in driving the Hestene and the sleds, and working with Hestene on ice and snow, by spending the summer of 1912 on this ice cap in Iceland. In order to prepare himself for this part of the journey, Wegener began a survey of the relevant literature. He began with materials closest to home, including the brand new journal Geologische Rundschau (then in its second year), founded and edited by his dean at Marburg, Emanuel Kayser.
In the July–August 1911 combined summer issue of Geologische Rundschau he discovered an article by Hans Reck (1886–1937), a geologist and paleontologist at Berlin: “Die Geologie Islands und ihrer Bedeutung fur Fragen der allgemeinen Geologie” (The geology of Iceland, and its significance for questions of general geology). It was a review article, a regular feature of this new journal, trying to bring various topics up to date, with the list of references featured at the very beginning of the article rather than at its end. Reck dealt with the new knowledge of the geology of Iceland obtained in the previous decade, with special attention to glaciation.56
Only a few pages further on in the same issue was a review article by Erich Krenkel (1880–1964) addressing what was currently known about the development of the Cretaceous formations of the African continent: “Die Entwicklung der Kreideformation auf dem afrikanischen Kontinente.”57 The list of references was very extensive, more than 100, and although this article had nothing to do with the research project at hand (the geology of Iceland), Wegen
er’s curiosity was easily aroused; perhaps the word “continent” in the title framed up his interest. In any case, he decided to take a look. A few pages into the text, as he flipped through, he came across the following passage:
Less clear are the relationships on the west coast of Africa. The oldest segments of the Cretaceous are Albien. Before this time it appears that there were no [Marine] transgressions onto the African-Brazilian continent … the African-Brazilian landmass still existed in the Cretaceous at least in the lower [Cretaceous], perhaps only on the equator. Everything points to faunal “echoes” such as the relationship of the Trigonians [a genus of clams] of the Uitenhag Formation of the Cape [South Africa] and the same in South America. In the Albien there followed a great Marine Transgression over the current West Coast [of Africa], and it is here that the European and Indian forms begin to appear.58
Let us consider the import of this passage. In a perfectly matter-of-fact way this geological author speaks of a continental mass composed of Africa and Brazil together. Toward the end of the Cretaceous this African-Brazilian continental mass was somewhat attenuated, but it still existed, confirmed by the geological reasoning that fossils of identical species of clams (shallow-water organisms that cannot cross abyssal oceans) were simultaneously deposited in (what is now) southern Africa and (what is now) South America. The appearance of the so-called Albien limestone, subsequent to the deposition of these fossils, was a consequence of an ocean spreading, or, as geologists say, “transgressing” all along the current coastline of all of West Africa. Not only that, but subsequent to this appearance of an ocean separating Africa and South America, the paleontological connections with South America were broken, and the species along the West African coast began increasingly to have similarities to species found in Europe and India in this same geological time period.
Wegener was completely overtaken by surprise. Here was geological evidence to support, in the most forceful way, his intuition that Africa and South America had once fit together as a single continent—the idea he had had at the very end of 1910 and subsequently failed to follow up on. He later wrote about this moment,
The first notion of the displacement of continents came to me in 1910 when, on studying the map of the world, I was impressed by the congruency of both sides of the Atlantic coasts, but I disregarded it at the time because I did not consider it probable. In the autumn of 1911 I became acquainted (through a collection of references, which came into my hands by accident) with the paleontological evidence of the former land connection between Brazil and Africa, of which I had not previously known. This induced me to undertake a hasty analysis of the results of research in this direction in the spheres of geology and paleontology, whereby such important confirmations were yielded, that I was convinced of the fundamental correctness of my idea.59
That this particular article by Krenkel was the source of this reawakening of his interest was first suggested by geologist Aart Brouwer in 1983, though Brouwer did not speculate about the circumstances under which Wegener came across it.60
Within the next few days, Wegener’s interest was further stimulated in the course of reading an article by Konrad Keilhack (1858–1944) entitled “Alte Eiszeiten der Erde” (Former ice ages of Earth). Keilhack had done work in Iceland in the 1880s on the splitting apart of sections of southern Iceland by “fault troughs.” He had also written on the subject of marine transgressions in Iceland and the correspondence between beds of shells in Iceland and those found in the island of Spitzbergen north of Norway.61 But the article at hand focused not on recent ice ages but on a much older ice age, in the Carboniferous period. By the 1870s most European geologists had become convinced that indeed the Northern Hemisphere had, in the recent geological past, experienced a great series of ice ages. Once European geologists learned to recognize glacial deposits, geologists working in South Africa and elsewhere came upon deposits of unmistakably glacial origin in much earlier periods of time.
Keilhack’s article on the ice ages appeared in a popular publication, Himmel und Erde, for which Wegener had also written. It roughly corresponded to a magazine today such as National Geographic, Endeavour, Smithsonian, Natural History, or New Scientist. Keilhack had written the article in 1895, to describe to the general reading public work done in the 1880s by geologists in Africa, Australia, India, and elsewhere on a cosmopolitan flora of ferns known today as the “Glossopteris flora.” That identical species of land plants appeared at the same time in continental masses now widely separated led inevitably to a conclusion of former land connections between these continents and also explained how an ice age could have taken place that left deposits on all of these continents.
The material was not recondite, nor was it new; it simply belonged to a field of discourse about which Wegener knew nothing. The little geology he had ever known was from practical field experience in hand sample collecting in Greenland, as well as knowledge resulting from a single course during the summer in his undergraduate years. While he was well read in geophysics, geology and geophysics were entirely separate disciplines. He was discovering that geological theorizing throughout the later nineteenth century and well into the twentieth century contained frequent references to former continental masses connecting now-separated continents.62
The passage that most excited Wegener appears toward the end of Keilhack’s article and was reiterated in a letter of 6 December Wegener wrote to Köppen. “Just now,” he wrote, “an article by Keilhack has fallen into my hands: Alte Eiszeiten der Erde (Himmel und Erde 1895, s.249) showing that South Africa, India and West Australia, and also South America, during the Carboniferous, had to have had a simultaneous ice age, with the same flora and so on.” He then went on to quote it extensively:
The extraordinary correspondence of flora and of geological deposits in the broad region between South Africa, the southern borders of Afghanistan, and that of Western Australia make it quite certain that here in the Carboniferous Period there extended a huge continent, which continent certainly at least between India and Africa persisted coherently up until the Tertiary, though the Australian segment detached itself somewhat earlier. Today the greater part of this older continental surface lies in the depths of the Indian Ocean. Whether the newest finds in South America will compel us to connect this southern continent with the others, we cannot yet say. In any case, the existence of this great continental massif, Lemuria, has long been established by a broad range of animal- and plant geographic studies, and geology serves here only to provide a new line of confirmatory evidence, though completely independent.…
There has been an attempt to assert a different position for the axis of the earth and to group the region of the Glossopteris flora around a new South Pole. However even when one leaves a South America completely out of the picture and only make the attempt to think of a pole position in which India, Africa, and Australia lie in the most likely position, so would such a pole end up somewhere in between Western Australia and Madagascar, and the location of the sites of the Carboniferous glacial beds farthest from the pole would then only be 30 or 35° from the new equator.63
Let us put this long quotation into the context of the discussion between Wegener and Köppen. It appears that Wegener had written to Köppen sometime in late November or early December; that letter does not survive. Neither is it referenced by Else, who remarks only that in the context of Wegener’s letter to her on 6 January 1911, first proposing the idea of a continuous continent containing both South America and Africa, her father subsequently “had warned Alfred that he should give up such ‘sidelines,’ and that it would be enough [work] to explain what was happening in meteorology.”64 Perhaps the letter to Köppen of 6 December 1911 merely picks up the conversation where it had been dropped the previous January, but likely not, since Wegener begins the letter, “Dear father, I must answer your detailed letter immediately.”65 Since the entire contents of this letter pertain to the question of former continents, we may assume that Wegene
r was answering Köppen’s objections in that letter.
Wegener laid out his argument thus:
I believe that you consider my “Original Continent” [Urkontinent] to be more of a fantasy than it is, and you still don’t see, that this is merely a question of the interpretation of the observational material. While it is true that I only came to the idea by noticing the fit of the contours of the coastlines, naturally the argument must be based on the observational results of geology. These results compel us to accept a land connection for example between South America and Africa that was [later] severed at some specific point in time. One can imagine this course of events in two different ways: 1) through the sinking of a connecting continent “Archhelenis” or 2) through their pulling apart from one another via some huge fault/fracture. Heretofore, because of the assumed inalterability of the position of all the land surfaces, most have taken into account 1) and ignored 2). Nevertheless 1) is directly contradicted by the modern doctrine of Isostasy, and by our physical conceptions generally. Thus we are forced once more to take 2) into consideration. And if this results in a series of astonishing simplifications, if it shows us the meaning and allows us to understand the entire history of the geological development of the earth, why should we hesitate to toss the old views overboard? Why should one refrain from expressing these ideas 10 or for that matter 30 years? x) [footnote mark in the original]. Is this, perhaps, revolutionary?66
Wegener added a footnote here: “I believe that the older views don’t have 10 years to live. Thus far the theory of isostasy is not completely worked out. When this happens the contradictions will become evident and the older view will be corrected.”67