Wegener got the idea to employ airplanes as tractors on an ice cap from the experiences of Douglas Mawson (1882–1958), the British/Australian Antarctic explorer, who had taken a damaged Vickers airplane to Antarctica in 1912. Its wings had been damaged in an aerial flight demonstration the year before, but stripped of its wings and mounted with skis, it was to be Mawson’s snow tractor. Apparently, the plane managed to pull one load in Antarctica before the engine seized up; it was a prototype aircraft from an earlier age of aviation, far inferior to the kind of airplanes being built in the 1920s. Moreover, Richard Byrd, an American navy officer who claimed in 1926 to have been the first man to fly over the North Pole, was in 1928 already in Antarctica with a trimotor aircraft similar to the one that he and Floyd Bennett had used in their flight to the North Pole; Bryd’s expedition also had snow tractors.6
Wegener appears to have already been moving from championing airships to championing fix-winged aircraft when his confidence in the whole airborne approach to the Arctic was badly shaken by a series of events in May 1928. Following the successful trans-Arctic flight of the airship Norge in 1926, Umberto Nobile (1885–1978) attempted another trans-Arctic flight in 1928 in his airship Italia. The airship crashed and tore apart while returning from the pole; ten members of the crew, including Nobile, were thrown to the ice and badly injured, and some died. The remaining crew members were swept away with the buoyant remains of the airship and perished. The international, month-long rescue effort included Roald Amundsen himself, who died when the French seaplane carrying him to the rescue headquarters disappeared; his body was never found. A Swedish pilot eventually rescued Nobile, but on returning to pick up others on the ice, he crashed his plane. In the course of the ensuing month of this incredibly bungled rescue attempt, more men died.7
Shortly before these events, Wegener and Köppen had received a visit in Graz over the Easter break (the first weekend in April) from Wilhelm Meinardus (1867–1952), a geographer on the faculty of the University of Göttingen. They were all mourning their friend and colleague Emil Wiechert, who had died in March. Wegener was just then in the process of finding someone to finish Wiechert’s chapter for the Lehrbuch; he was to have written the extensive chapter entitled “Mechanics and Thermodynamics of the Solid Earth.” His final illness had prevented him from completing major sections, but Wegener had been able to convince Beno Gutenberg, who had already written subchapters on seismology, isostasy, and movements of Earth’s axis, to finish the job. The timeline was short, but Gutenberg was grateful for the offer, not least because he was one of Wiechert’s students and a possible successor to him at Göttingen.8
Meinardus, Köppen, and Wegener reminisced about Altmeister Wiechert, but that is not why Meinardus had come to Graz. He had been working for several years on “explosion seismology,” in which one set off an array of explosive charges and recorded (with portable seismographs) the resulting reflection profiles from the subsurface. He had had a good field trial of this technique working with Hans Mothes (1902–1989) in 1926 on glaciers in the Austrian Alps, and Mothes had gone on to develop the technique extensively. Meinardus had come to ask Wegener whether he would be willing to lead a summer expedition to Greenland to test this technique on a larger scale, where the ice was perhaps hundreds of meters thick, rather than a few score. He was prepared to use his influence to obtain funding from the Emergency Committee for German Science (Notgemeinschaft der Deutschen Wissenschaft), the organization that provided the means for almost all of German science at this time.
Wegener seems to have accepted the offer nearly on the spot; not only that, but he replied that the summer expedition to test the seismological technique in 1929 should serve also as a reconnaissance expedition for a two-year expedition in 1930 and 1931 to solve the “full range of questions” concerning the Inland Ice of Greenland. Wegener was, by the common standard, too old for this kind of work. Yet he seems to have convinced Else that Greenland was by now so well known that it was fruitless to even attempt adventurous record-setting expeditions. Moreover, as leader of the expedition, the most strenuous physical tasks would fall to others and not to him. Finally, the technical side of polar travel had developed to the point where he would have a very different set of tools in order to overcome the obstacles and the distances.9 Everything we know of every Arctic expedition to this date (1928) tells us that none of these three statements were very near the truth, and Wegener certainly knew that. It was, however, the story with which he overcame her natural objections, and he stuck to it.
Wegener was by nature restless and physically active. Each year in Graz he had chafed more at the isolation, and he traveled further afield to scientific meetings. Moreover, by the summer of 1927, he was pushing himself in a series of Alpine ascents in Austria and Germany, climbing peak after peak. Alfred’s longest stay in any one place since leaving home in 1906 was the three years he spent in Hamburg between April 1919 and the April 1922 trip to Mexico. He had arrived in Graz in April 1924, and he had not been anywhere, with the exception of weekend trips and brief summer vacations, in four years. He was ready to move, and this was his best chance.
In April 1928, Wegener had accepted the role of contributing editor to Arktis, but following Meinardus’s visit and the crash of the airship Italia, he withdrew his paper from the planned AEROARCTIC meeting in Leningrad and withdrew any plan to publish it in the journal Arktis. A later communication with Willi Meyer, author of a book on the Arctic crash of the zeppelin Italia (Der Kampf um Nobile, 1931), shows Wegener’s concern that AEROARCTIC was more about economics and individual “milestone” competition than about science; he also withdrew at this time from a planned (polar) zeppelin flight he had nominally agreed to join, one that was to take place in 1929.10
By June 1928, at the latest, Wegener had committed completely to Meinardus’s suggestion of a summer expedition in 1929, as well as to his own idea to plan and lead a full-year expedition to Greenland in 1930–1931, for which the 1929 trip would be a reconnaissance (Vorexpedition).
Already in June he had provided a sketch of his plans to Peter Freuchen, asking for advice, and by July he was already in correspondence with Georgi about how to meld the latter’s plan to study the high-velocity current in the upper atmosphere (the jet stream) with the plan hatched by Wegener, Koch, and Freuchen before the war: three stations across Greenland at latitude 71° north, all three performing aerological work and tracking the weather.11 Wegener was forced to approach Georgi immediately, as the latter had already submitted his own plan to the Notgemeinschaft for an overwintering station in 1929 north of Angmagssalik, with the idea of overwintering—himself—on the Inland Ice in 1930.12 Wegener did not want these proposals to compete, and he offered Georgi the overwintering at the mid-ice station if he would agree to merge the plans. To this meteorological work Wegener wanted to attach a major glaciology program—Meinardus’s seismology of the ice, but also glacier motion studies and analyses of the microcrystalline structure of névé, firn, and glacier ice.
Such a plan could not, Wegener’s desire notwithstanding, entirely avoid commercial interests, nationalism, or personal ambition. Both the Americans and the British planned Greenland overwinterings in 1930–1931. The American expedition, modest in scope (two men) and sponsored by the University of Michigan, was inspired by William H. Hobbs (1864–1952) and planned meteorological and glaciological work with a specific aim: to test Hobbs’s theory of the “glacial anticyclone.” Hobbs believed that a giant ice cap like Greenland or Antarctica could create its own weather, and that the extremely cold air of the interior would create a permanent “blocking high pressure center” that would steer cyclonic storms away from the interior of Greenland, either to the north or to the south. To test this idea, the Americans would build a base in the Upernavik region at latitude 72° north on the west coast of Greenland.
The British planned the (privately funded) “British Arctic Air Route Expedition” for 1930–1931 to detect wind conditions in the inter
ior of Greenland. With the Atlantic now “conquered” from the air, Europeans and Americans were preparing for commercial and (without saying so) military transatlantic flights. The Great Circle route across Greenland from North Europe seemed most economical of time and fuel; the question was the weather and wind conditions. The British expedition was planning some essential meteorological research, but it mostly planned to test the flight conditions. They would work from the southeastern coast of Greenland at a shore station near the settlement of Angmagssalik (now Tasillaq) at latitude 65° north, but they also planned an Inland Ice station for overwintering at an altitude of 2,600 meters (8,600 feet) about 160 kilometers (100 miles) from the coast.
By 1928 Germany had been scientifically isolated for almost fifteen years. The Meteor Expedition had been the first major scientific expedition to leave Germany since early 1914. A German expedition to Greenland would be the first land-based scientific effort outside Germany since Filchner’s expedition had returned from Antarctica in 1912. The German scientific establishment in Berlin, including Albrecht Penck and the Antarctic explorer Erich von Drygalski, knew and respected Wegener. Drygalski knew, or suspected he knew, that Wegener was thinking of going to Greenland again because in July 1927 Wegener had written to him asking whether he had any leftover copies of the results of his two-year expedition to West Greenland in 1891–1893.13 Actually, Wegener was just looking for any information to help flesh out his and Koch’s glaciological work, but the result was the same: Drygalski wanted to get Wegener involved once again in Germany’s polar plans.
Meinardus was the perfect envoy and intermediary to involve Wegener in Germany’s polar future. Meinardus, like Wegener, was both a meteorologist and a geophysicist. He had written his doctoral dissertation in the 1890s under Köppen at Hamburg, work that is today credited with the discovery of what is now known as the Intertropical Convergence Zone. He had developed a great reputation as a climatologist, and he and Köppen were in 1928 planning joint work on a new edition of Köppen’s climate handbook. When Drygalski had returned from the Antarctic in 1903, he had entrusted the working up of the expedition’s data to Meinardus, and now, more than twenty years later, massive volumes of results continued to appear through the latter’s industry and acumen. There was a confluence here of mutual understanding, experience, and respect. More to the point, Meinardus and Drygalski were interested in science, not adventure travel, and Wegener knew this. The thought of combining his own long-planned Greenland work with Meinardus’s glacial seismology was almost too good to be true; a seismic profile of the Inland Ice could demonstrate the truth of isostasy with measurements. If the theory of “glacial loading” were true, Greenland should be shown by a seismic reflection profile to be a gigantic ice-filled bowl. The implications for displacement theory would also be substantial and positive.
A number of things now had to proceed concurrently. Wegener had to develop a plan both for the reconnaissance expedition and for the main expedition—one had to know what the main expedition was going to do before one could carry out a reconnaissance about where best to accomplish it. To flesh out this plan, he wanted to talk further with Freuchen, who, since the death of Koch, was the Arctic explorer in whom he had the greatest confidence. Until the loss of his leg in 1923, Freuchen had been exploring in the Arctic for eleven consecutive years. After talking to Freuchen, Wegener had to come to an agreement with Georgi about the way in which their expedition plans should be combined. He then had to fill out the scientific complement for the reconnaissance expedition with at least two other men and present a formal plan to the Notgemeinschaft for approval.
That, however, was not all. He still, as he said to Köppen, had to “liquidate” all his current writing projects. These included the work on the 1912–1913 expedition, on which he signed off in June. He was waiting only for Gutenberg to complete what Wiechert had left undone before the Lehrbuch could be sent to the press. The last and largest project he had to liquidate was the fourth edition of his book on the origin of continents and oceans.14
The Origin of Continents and Oceans, 1928
Wegener made it quite clear in the fourth edition of his book that the origin of continents and oceans belonged to his past and not to his future. This edition was something he had begun to work on in late 1927 before he decided to redirect his energy toward Greenland. Now, in the spring of 1928, it had the same status as his work on the 1912–1913 expedition to Greenland and his work on the geophysical Lehrbuch—it was something to finish as quickly as possible so that he could place his energy elsewhere. Before it was even complete, he had told Kurt that it was the last edition he would attempt; the component literatures were now too numerous and too specialized for him to master.15 He repeated this judgment even more feelingly in a brief foreword, when he said, “At times … my spirits failed me during the revision of the book.”16
The book was an uneasy hybrid, and he knew it. “Whereas,” he wrote, “the earlier editions were for the most part simply a presentation of the theory and a collection of individual facts that spoke to its correctness, this new edition represents a transition to a synoptic review of the various new branches of research [inspired by the theory].”17 The book was still about the origin of continents and oceans, but it might have been better titled Introduction to the Displacement Theory, or Handbook of the Displacement Theory, as it was much more an introduction to a field of study, or a synoptic collection of varying opinions on significant issues within that field, than a dedicated theoretical treatise. He wrote the book in sections, and the sections do not always agree with one another in their conclusions. The shell of advocacy from the earlier editions remains, but he interjected and modified so thoroughly, adding reservations and contrary opinions, that the overall tone in many passages is almost agnostic. Perhaps the best title would have been Basic Questions Concerning the Displacement Theory, as the finished work has many more “fundamental questions” than firm answers.
This is not to say that he had succumbed to doubt; he was as convinced as ever of the rightness of his central idea and equally convinced that the preponderance of the evidence in most of the fields of earth science still pointed toward his hypothesis rather than away from it—notwithstanding the abundance of cogent objections to his specific formulations. Sometime in early 1928 he had shown Benndorf a letter he had just received from Denmark indicating that the 1927 longitude measurements in Godthab, Greenland, seemed to confirm Jensen’s 1922 estimate of a drift of Greenland to the west at 36 meters (118 feet) per year. Benndorf expressed astonishment that Wegener did not seem more pleased, to which Wegener laconically replied, “I’ve always known it was true; the question is now whether the others will finally believe it.”18
Though fully convinced of the truth of his hypothesis and confident that these 1927 Greenland measurements had “put the theory on a different footing,” now that there was “astronomical proof” of displacement, he was by 1928 tired of battling over numerous matters of detail marshaled by men who had become obsessed with opposing his theory, such as Georg Pfeffer and Carl Diener.19 This sort of jousting had come to a head for him in late 1927 when he finally broke his long-standing rule of not engaging in disputes in learned journals with individual authors who opposed him.
He lost patience on the occasion of the publication in geophysical journals of two articles, as well as an ensuing book, by Hermann von Ihering (1850–1930), a German ornithologist and émigré to Brazil who had returned to Germany in 1920 after forty years abroad and had decided to spend his retirement years, beginning at age seventy-seven, in opposing Wegener. Wegener’s rebuttal, published in Zeitschrift für Geophysik, pointed out seven major gratuitous (willkürlich) misquotations of Wegener’s work by von Ihering, and he noted that the latter was still working from a copy of the second edition and had not seen either the third edition or the Köppen and Wegener climate book. Moreover, von Ihering had got it in his mind that Wegener and Irmscher (the botanist from Hamburg) were coauthors
, though Irmscher’s work was quite independent of Wegener’s own from the standpoint of authorship.20
Wegener’s article in rebuttal made an important subsidiary point. Though von Ihering was totally opposed to Wegener’s notion of continental displacements, the data von Ihering had published in his recent book, Die Geschichte des Atlantischen Ozeans (1927), was in profound agreement with the basic contentions of Wegener and Köppen’s book on the climates of the past.21 This was something that Wegener had often seen before—that the empirical facts produced by a scientist’s research and a scientist’s theoretical commitments were entirely separate entities. Wegener was more than happy to infuriate von Ihering by including his researches in the fourth edition as evidence favoring displacement.22 He would not, however, engage in disputation any longer, and his decision not to reply combatively (after writing about von Ihering) kept the fourth edition remarkably free of contentiousness, without avoiding disagreement.
The fourth edition of Wegener’s book is nearly 100 pages longer than the third, making it even more difficult to summarize. Fortunately, the fundamental structure of the argument remains; most of the new material revises and extends evidence for the displacement theory, and the remainder tries to address remaining questions by giving a range of opinion. Thus, while preserving the notion that there are advocates of continental permanence, of land bridges, and even of the old and discredited version of the contraction theory, the book is less a contest between opposing viewpoints than it is a series of differences of opinions within what Henry Frankel has aptly called the “sub-controversies” emerging from Wegener’s theory.23
Alfred Wegener Page 101