Alfred Wegener Read online

  ALFRED WEGENER

  Alfred Wegener

  * * *

  Science, Exploration, and the Theory of Continental Drift

  * * *

  MOTT T. GREENE

  JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY PRESS Baltimore

  © 2015 Johns Hopkins University Press

  All rights reserved. Published 2015

  Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

  2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1

  Johns Hopkins University Press

  2715 North Charles Street

  Baltimore, Maryland 21218-4363

  www.press.jhu.edu

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Greene, Mott T., 1945–

  Alfred Wegener : science, exploration, and the theory of continental drift.

  pages cm

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-1-4214-1712-7 (hardcover : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-4214-1713-4 (electronic) — ISBN 1-4214-1712-X (hardcover : alk. paper) — ISBN 1-4214-1713-8 (electronic) 1. Wegener, Alfred, 1880–1930. 2. Geophysicists—Germany—Biography. 3. Continental drift. I. Title.

  QE511.5.G74 2015

  551.1'36092—dc23

  [B] 2014039517

  A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Special discounts are available for bulk purchases of this book. For more information, please contact Special Sales at 410-516-6936 or [email protected].

  Johns Hopkins University Press uses environmentally friendly book materials, including recycled text paper that is composed of at least 30 percent post-consumer waste, whenever possible.

  To my wife

  JO LEFFINGWELL

  Contents

  Preface

  Acknowledgments

  1 THE BOY: Berlin and Brandenburg, 1880–1899

  2 THE STUDENT: Berlin-Heidelberg-Innsbruck-Berlin, 1899–1901

  3 THE ASTRONOMER: Berlin, 1901–1904

  4 THE AEROLOGIST: Lindenberg, 1905–1906

  5 THE POLAR METEOROLOGIST: Greenland, 1906

  6 THE ARCTIC EXPLORER (1): Greenland, 1907–1908

  7 THE ATMOSPHERIC PHYSICIST (1): Berlin and Marburg, 1908–1910

  8 THE ATMOSPHERIC PHYSICIST (2): Marburg, 1910

  9 AT A CROSSROADS: Marburg, 1911

  10 THE THEORIST OF CONTINENTAL DRIFT (1): Marburg, December 1911–February 1912

  11 THE THEORIST OF CONTINENTAL DRIFT (2): Marburg, February–April 1912

  12 THE ARCTIC EXPLORER (2): Greenland, 1912–1913

  13 THE SOLDIER: Marburg and “The Field,” 1913–1915

  14 THE METEOROLOGIST: “In the Field,” 1916–1918

  15 THE GEOPHYSICIST: Hamburg, 1919–1920

  16 FROM GEOPHYSICIST TO CLIMATOLOGIST: Hamburg, 1920–1922

  17 THE PALEOCLIMATOLOGIST: Hamburg, 1922–1924

  18 THE PROFESSOR: Graz, 1924–1928

  19 THEORIST AND ARCTIC EXPLORER: Graz and Greenland, 1928–1929

  20 THE EXPEDITION LEADER: Graz and Greenland, 1929–1930

  EPILOGUE

  Notes

  Bibliographical Essay

  Index

  Preface

  This is a book about the life and scientific work of Alfred Wegener, whose reputation today rests with his theory of continental displacements, better known as “continental drift.” Wegener proposed this theory in 1912 and developed it extensively for nearly twenty years. His book on the subject, The Origin of Continents and Oceans, went through four editions and was the focus of an international controversy in his lifetime and for some years after his death. It was translated into English, French, Italian, Spanish, Swedish, Russian, and Japanese.

  Wegener’s basic idea was that many (otherwise) intractable problems and puzzles of the earth’s history could be solved if one supposed that the continents moved laterally, rather than supposing that they remained fixed in place. Wegener worked systematically over many years to show in great detail how such continental movements were plausible and how they worked, using evidence and results from a large number of sciences: geology, geodesy, geophysics, paleontology, climatology, and paleogeography.

  Wegener’s idea—that the continents move—is at the heart of the theory that guides the earth sciences today: plate tectonics. This theory is in many respects quite different from Wegener’s proposal, in the same way that modern evolutionary theory is very different from Darwin’s original ideas about biological evolution. Yet plate tectonics is a descendent of Alfred Wegener’s theory of continental drift, in quite the same way that modern evolutionary theory is a descendent of Darwin’s theory of natural selection.

  Given that Wegener is the progenitor of a major theory governing a modern science, it comes as something of a surprise to discover that no scholarly biography treating his life and scientific work has ever been attempted. His wife wrote and published an appreciative memoir in 1960, and since then there has been a good and useful popular biography by Ulrich Wutzke, the world’s leading authority on the provenance and location of Wegener’s papers. Wutzke’s book, however, contains almost no discussion of Wegener’s scientific work and concentrates instead on Wegener’s exciting career in polar exploration. Its major narrative line follows closely the book by Wegener’s wife. Both of these books are out of print.1

  Of the many things that make Wegener an interesting story, perhaps the most intriguing is that, although he was the author of a “geological theory” (continental drift), he was not a geologist. He was trained as an astronomer and pursued a career in atmospheric physics. When he proposed the theory of continental displacements (1912), he was thirty-one years old and an instructor of physics and astronomy at the University of Marburg, in southern Germany. He was not “unknown.” In 1906 he had set a world record (with his brother Kurt) for time aloft in a free balloon: fifty-two hours. Between 1906 and 1908 he had taken part in a highly publicized and extremely dangerous expedition to explore the coast of northeast Greenland. He was also known—to the much smaller circle of meteorologists and atmospheric physicists in Germany—as the author of a textbook, Thermodynamics of the Atmosphere (1911), and of a number of interesting scientific papers on atmospheric layering.2

  As important as Wegener’s work on continental drift has turned out to be, it was largely a sideline to his principal career in atmospheric physics, geophysics, and paleoclimatology, and thus I have been at great pains to put Wegener’s work on continental displacements in the larger context of his life and his other scientific work, and to put that life and work into the still larger context of the character of the earth and atmospheric sciences in his lifetime. This is a “continental drift book” only to the extent that Wegener was interested in that topic and later became famous for it. My treatment of his other scientific work is no less detailed, though I certainly have devoted more attention to the reception of his ideas on continental displacement, as they were much more controversial than his other work.

  Readers interested in one aspect or another of Wegener’s career will see that he often stopped pursuing a given line of investigation (sometimes for years on end), only to pick it up later. I have tried to provide guideposts to his rapidly shifting interests by characterizing different phases of his career as careers in different sciences, which is reflected in the titles of the chapters. Thus, the table of contents and the index should be sufficient guides for those interested in some aspect of Wegener’s life but perhaps not all of it. My own feeling is that the parts do not make as much sense on their own as the ensemble of all his activities taken together. This is not an unusual standpoint for a biographer to take, but I do urge my readers to try to experience Wegener’s life as he lived it, with all the interruptions, blind all
eys, changes of mind, and renewed efforts this entailed.

  In the most general sense, scientific biography exists to explain how the inner experience of certain individuals becomes the shared “outer experience of the world” that is science. The sciences are not about our inner, private experiences of the world, but only our shared, outer experiences of the world; only in this way can we compare the evidence and decide together what is true and what is not. This is a drastic restriction and a severe rule, but it is what allows the culture of evidence to exist and prevail against mere opinion.

  In writing scientific biographies, we generally reconstruct the inner experience of scientists not from their published papers and books but from notebooks, letters, reminiscences of those who knew them, and other such material. Some scientists, such as Newton, Darwin, and Einstein, left mountains of such material behind, letters numbering in the tens of thousands. Others, like Michael Faraday, left extensive journals of their thoughts and speculations, parallel to their scientific notebooks. The more such material a scientist leaves behind, the better our chance of forming an accurate picture of how his or her ideas took shape and evolved. Of course, the sequence of scientific books and papers tells this story, but the story it tells is of the results, and not of the search. Since the seventeenth century, it has been the rule that scientists should report the results and not the history of their investigations: published science is someone’s version of a correct answer, with all the false starts, mistakes, and frustrations left out. Were it not so, the history of science as a scholarly undertaking would be nearly irrelevant, as the “story behind the story” would already be there.

  What biography also accomplishes that a study of disembodied scientific “movements” or of published papers and books does not is specific knowledge of how certain cultural movements and scientific developments come together in a given time and place. It does this by re-creating the conjunction of these entities, motives, ideas, and events in the life and mind of a single subject. In other words, if we wish to do more than conjecture how events might go together or how they might have gone together—how some philosophy or activity or life experience might have had a part in some scientific development—we have few alternatives to finding them integrated in the mind of a single significant individual and then documenting that integration. One tries to re-create a biographical subject within a historical context and then have the further development of that context explained to some extent by the creative activity of the subject.3

  This approach, through journals and private papers, makes Alfred Wegener a difficult subject for a scientific biography because only a few hundred of the many thousands of letters he wrote in his lifetime have survived. Deeply introverted and focused on his work, he was not interested in recording his inner life, and he kept no notebooks containing his speculations or diaries recording his activities. He restricted his journal writing entirely to his scientific expeditions, beginning on the first day of such expeditions and ending on the last. He only very occasionally kept copies of the letters he sent and received, and most of these were lost or destroyed at the end of the Second World War. He had few close friendships, was not active (with a few exceptions) in scientific societies, and did not seek to find influence or advance his ideas through professional contacts and politics, spending most of his time at home in his study reading and writing, or in the field collecting observations.

  Wegener’s story is also difficult for another reason: no other earth scientist has worked successfully in as many fields as did Wegener. He produced important publications in lunar and planetary astronomy, meteoritics, atmospheric thermodynamics, the theory of precipitation, atmospheric acoustics, optics, turbulence, layering, the physics of clouds, the theory of tornadoes, climatology, paleoclimatology, geology, geophysics, geodesy, and glaciology.

  The great breadth of Wegener’s scientific work created formidable difficulties for me. Most of it took place within sciences (listed above) for which there are no standard histories in which to insert his story. As the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss pointed out some years ago, biography is “weak history” and gets its strength and meaning only when attached to a larger narrative for which it, in turn, provides fine-grained detail.4 Much of the labor of constructing the story of Wegener’s life has been the parallel construction (from the original scientific books and papers) of detailed “master narratives” of scientific ideas in atmospheric physics, geophysics, climatology, and paleoclimatology (and to a lesser extent meteoritics and glaciology) between 1880 and 1930, so that I might be able to assess where the mainstream lay relative to Wegener’s work, as well as where he was influential and where he was not.

  In the early stages of writing this book I asked my friend, L. Pearce Williams (the biographer of Michael Faraday), what the main line of attack in writing such a book should be. He told me, “Read everything he wrote. Read everything he read. Read as much as you can of what the people he read, read.” This counsel of perfection has cost me twenty years of hard work, but I think I have at least approached that daunting goal. I also asked Richard Westfall (the biographer of Isaac Newton) what advice he had about writing a biography. He said, “Try to have your subject on every page, and whenever possible, when explaining his science, let him do it in his own words.” I have tried to follow this advice as well.

  In the course of researching and writing this biography I traveled to every place Alfred Wegener lived and worked. This took me to Berlin, rural Brandenburg, Marburg, Hamburg, and Heidelberg in Germany and to Innsbruck and Graz in Austria. It took me as well onto the Greenland ice cap. I visited the archives in Copenhagen, Munich, Marburg, Graz, and Bremerhaven, where the majority of his surviving letters and papers are to be found. Readers will find additional details concerning these documents in the bibliographical essay at the end of this book.

  Although scientific biography is a nonfiction genre, in which one makes only evidence-based claims, it is also in its own way the writing of a historical novel according to special rules—an observation credited to Umberto Eco. This notion, at first rather odd, improves on acquaintance. The special rules for biography are not numerous, but they are severe: the events reported must really have happened, one must report them in the order they transpired, one may not leave out any significant detail even if it changes the story in a way the author of the biography may not like, and all events reported must be based on surviving written evidence.

  I have invented nothing and have made no claims not supported by documentary evidence. I am the sworn enemy of phrases such as “Wegener must have known,” or “Wegener was certainly familiar with,” phrases to which biographers often resort in the absence of evidence. If the structure of my biography observes the conventions of the Bildungsroman (the novel of individual self-development), as indeed does every biography of a scientist I have ever read, the content of this biography of Wegener is rigorously empirical. I take no liberties with the historical record.

  Nevertheless, no matter how empirically well founded, a scientific biography is a “novel with special rules,” and it has literary conventions as well. It should have a plot and should show the development of the protagonist from birth to death. Moreover, because generally we only see biographies of highly successful scientists, the genre convention of the “eureka moment,” in which the fundamental important discovery appears in the mind of the scientist in question, is always in the forefront of the mind of the reader, and a biography of a great scientist that does not have such a eureka moment would generally be considered to be lacking.

  I am aware of these conventions and have written about them elsewhere in some detail, concerning in particular their dependence on the folkloric conventions of the “hero’s quest.”5 I mention them here only so that the reader may know that I am aware of them and how they exert a pull on the biographer’s activity. I hasten to assure the reader that Wegener’s life has enough danger and drama to sustain such an approach, and the moments of import
ant discovery are clearly discernible in his work. When he thought he had made an important discovery, had done something entirely new, or possibly had revolutionized a field of study, he generally said so in print at that time.

  That being said, the reader should also know that I am firmly of the opinion that most of us, Wegener included, are not in any real sense the authors of our own lives. We plan, think, and act, often with apparent freedom, but most of the time our lives “happen to us,” and we only retrospectively turn this happenstance into a coherent narrative of fulfilled intentions. This book therefore is a story both of the life and scientific work that Alfred Wegener planned and intended and of the life and scientific work that actually “happened to him.” These are, as I think you will soon see, not always the same thing.

  Acknowledgments

  I am very grateful to all those who helped me pursue and complete this project. I owe a debt of gratitude to Ms. Kirsten Caning, of the Arktisk Institut (now at the Dansk Polarcenter), for orienting me to Wegener’s career in Greenland and for her generosity with documents and advice. She urged me not to be content to chronicle Wegener’s career but to understand him psychologically as well—important advice.

  I could not have completed this book in its present form without the benefit of the tireless researches of Ulrich Wutzke, also a Wegener biographer, who has uncovered all the surviving documents concerning Wegener and his career. I am grateful to him for meeting me in Marburg and showing me Wegener’s various residences in that city.

  I thank the staff of the Deutsches Museum in Munich and the Alfred Wegener Institute in Bremerhaven for their assistance in exploring the Wegener archives in these two institutions. I wish also to thank Irina Rockel of the Heimatmuseum, Neuruppin, for her assistance, especially with photographic and documentary resources concerning Wegener’s childhood. Walter Hoflechner and Siegfried Bauer of the Karl-Franzens University, Graz, were very generous with time and resources, as well as anecdotes concerning Wegener’s time in Graz. I received similar help from Hermann Günzel at the University of Marburg, for which I wish to thank him as well.