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• TORNADO RESEARCH IN EUROPE BETWEEN 1840 AND 1910.
• WEGENER’S RESEARCH ON TORNADOES BEFORE 1915.
• WRITING WIND- UND WASSERHOSEN IN EUROPA: 1916.
• WIND- UND WASSERHOSEN IN EUROPA: 1917.
• WEGENER’S RESEARCH ON TORNADOES: 1918–1930.
• CONCLUSIONS.

Antonescu , B. , 2017 : Tornadoes and Waterspouts in Europe: Depictions from 1555 to 1910 . Blurb , 100 pp.

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Antonescu , B. , D. M. Schultz , F. Lomas , and T. Kühne , 2016 : Tornadoes in Europe: Synthesis of the observational datasets . Mon. Wea. Rev. , 144 , 2445 – 2480 , https://doi.org/10.1175/MWR-D-15-0298.1 .

Antonescu , B. , D. M. Schultz , A. Holzer , and P. Groenemeijer , 2017 : Tornadoes in Europe: An underestimated threat . Bull. Amer. Meteor. Soc. , 98 , 713 – 728 , https://doi.org/10.1175/BAMS-D-16-0171.1 .

Bigelow , F. H. , 1906 : Studies on the thermodynamics of the atmosphere: VI. The waterspout seen off Cottage City, Mass., in Vineyard Sound, on August 19, 1896 . Mon. Wea. Rev. , 34 , 307 – 315 , https://doi.org/10.1175/1520-0493(1906)34<307:SOTTOT>2.0.CO;2 .

Dotzek , N. , A. M. Holzer , R. E. Peterson , and C. Lüdecke , 2005 : Alfred Wegener’s tornado research and his influence on Johannes Letzmann: Scientific achievements decades ahead of their time . Preprints, Second Alfred Wegener Symp ., Bremerhaven, Germany , Alfred Wegener Institute .

Feuerstein , B. , and P. Groenemeijer , 2011 : In memoriam Nikolai Dotzek . Atmos. Res. , 100 , 306 – 309 , https://doi.org/10.1016/j.atmosres.2011.02.005 .

Finley , J. P. , 1887 : Tornadoes: What They Are and How to Observe Them . Insurance Monitor Press , 196 pp.

Friis , A. , 1913 : Im Grönlandeis mit Mylius-Erichsen Die Danmark -Expedition 1906–1908 ( In Greenland with the Mylius-Erichsen Danmark Expedition 1906–1908 ). Springer , 630 pp.

Galway , J. G. , 1985 : The first severe storms forecaster . Bull. Amer. Meteor. Soc. , 66 , 1506 – 1510 , https://doi.org/10.1175/1520-0477(1985)066<1506:JFTFSS>2.0.CO;2 .

Gordin , M. D. , 2015 : Scientific Babel: The Language of Science from the Fall of Latin to the Rise of English . Profile Books , 415 pp.

Greene , M. T. , 2015 : Alfred Wegener: Science, Exploration, and the Theory of Continental Drift . Johns Hopkins University Press , 675 pp.

Groenemeijer , P. , and Coauthors , 2017 : Severe convective storms in Europe: Ten years of research and education at the European Severe Storms Laboratory . Bull. Amer. Meteor. Soc. , 98 , 2641 – 2651 , https://doi.org/10.1175/BAMS-D-16-0067.1 .

Hepites , S. C. , 1887 : Trombe à Bucharest . Ciel Terre , 7 , 234 – 237 .

Keraunos , 2018 : Tornade EF4 à Châtenay-en-France (Val-d’Oise) le 18 Juin 1839 [An EF4 tornado at Châtenay-en-France (Val-d’Oise) on 18 June 1839]. Keraunos, www.keraunos.org/actualites/faits-marquants/1800-1849/tornade-chatenay-en-france-18-juin-1839-trombe-chatenay-ile-de-france .

Koch , J. P. , and A. Wegener , 1911 : Die glaciologischen Beobachtungen der Danmark -Expedition (The glaciological observations of the Danmark expedition) . Medd. Grønland , 46 , 1 – 77 .

Köppen , W. , and A. Wegener , 1924 : Die Klimate der Geologischen Vorzeit ( The Climates of the Geological Past ) . Borntraeger , 255 pp.

Letzmann , J. , 1920 : Tromben im ostbaltischen Gebiet im ostbaltischen Gebiet (Tornadoes in the east Baltic area) . Sitzungsber. Naturforsch. Ges. Univ. Dorpat , 26 , 7 – 46 .

Letzmann , J. , 1931 : Experimentelle Untersuchungen an Luftwirbeln (Experimental investigations on air vortices) . Gerlands Beitr. Geophys. , 33 , 130 – 172 .

Letzmann , J. , and H. Koschmieder , 1937 : Richtlinien zur Erforschung von Tromben, Tornado, Wasserhosen und Kleintromben (Guidelines for research on funnels, tornadoes, waterspouts and whirlwinds) . Int. Meteor. Organ. Klimatologische Komm. , 38 , 91 – 110 .

Lüdecke , C. , E. Tammiksaar , and U. Wutzke , 2000 : Alfred Wegener und sein Einfluss auf die Meteorologie an der Universität Dorpat (Tartu) [Alfred Wegener and his influence on meteorology at the University of Dorpat (Tartu)] . Meteor. Z. , 9 , 175 – 183 , https://doi.org/10.1127/metz/9/2000/175 .

Lundager , A. , 1907 : Fotografi-journal (Photographic diary) . Danmark -Ekspeditionen , Arktisk Institute , A 300 , 139 . 5 .

Martins , C. , 1849 : Instructions pour l’observation des trombes terrestres (Instructions for observing tornadoes) . Annu. Météor. France , 1 , 225 – 244 .

Martins , C. , 1850 : Anweisung zur Beobachtung der Windhosen oder Tromben (Instructions for observing water-spouts or tornadoes) . Poggendorff’s Ann. Phys. , 157 , 444 – 467 , https://doi.org/10.1002/andp.18501571110 .

Mohorovičić , A. , 1892 : Windhose bei Novska (Slavonien) [Tornado at Novska (Slavonia)] . Meteor. Z. , 27 , 320 .

Peltier , F. A. , 1847 : Notice sur la Vie et les Travaux Scientifiques de J. C. A. Peltier ( Notice on the Life and Scientific Work of J. C. A. Peltier ). Imprimerie de Édouard Bautruche , 472 pp.

Peltier , J. C. A. , 1840 : Météorologie: Observations et Recherches Expérimentales sur les Causes qui Concourent à la Formation des Trombes (Meteorology: Observations and Experimental Research on the Causes that Contribute to the Formation of Tornadoes ) . H. Cousin , 444 pp.

Peterson , R. E. , 1982 : Tornadic activity in Europe—The last half century . Preprints, 12th Int. Conf. on Severe Local Storms , San Antonio, TX , Amer. Meteor. Soc. , 63 – 66 .

Peterson , R. E. , 1992a : Johannes Letzmann: A pioneer in the study of tornadoes . Wea. Forecasting , 7 , 166 – 184 , https://doi.org/10.1175/1520-0434(1992)007<0166:JLAPIT>2.0.CO;2 .

Peterson , R. E. , 1992b : Letzmann and Koschmieder’s “Guidelines for research on funnels, tornadoes, waterspouts and whirlwinds .” Bull. Amer. Meteor. Soc. , 73 , 597 – 611 , https://doi.org/10.1175/1520-0477(1992)073<0597:LAKFRO>2.0.CO;2 .

Reye , T. , 1872 : Die Wirbelstürme, Tornados und Wettersäulen in der Erdatmosphäre mit Berücksichtigung der Stürme in der Sonnen-Atmosphäre ( Hurricanes, Tornadoes and “Weather Columns” in the Earth’s Atmosphere with Respect to Storms in the Sun’s Atmosphere ) . Carl Rümpler , 250 pp.

Romano , M. , and R. L. Cifelli , 2015 : 100 years of continental drift . Science , 350 , 915 – 916 , https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aad6230 .

Ward , R. D. , 1920 : European tornadoes . Geogr. Rev. , 9 , 217 – 218 , https://doi.org/10.2307/207266 .

Wegener , A. , 1905 : Die Alfonsinischen Tafeln für den Gebrauch eines modernen Rechners (The Alfonsinian tablets for the use of a modern calculator). Ph.D. thesis, Facultät der Friderich-Wilhelms-Universität zu Berlin , 64 pp., http://digi.evifa.de/viewer/image/BV041981724/3/ .

Wegener , A. , 1907 : Tagebücher (Diaries) June 1906–August 1908. Deutsches Museum Archive, NL 001/007, www.environmentandsociety.org/exhibitions/wegener-diaries/overview .

Wegener , A. , 1910 : Über die Eisphase des Wasserdampfes in der Atmosphäre (On the ice phase of water vapor in the atmosphere) . Meteor. Z. , 27 , 451 – 459 .

Wegener , A. , 1911a : Die Windverhältnisse in der Stratosphäre (The wind conditions in the stratosphere) . Meteor. Z. , 28 , 271 – 273 .

Wegener , A. , 1911b : Letter from Alfred Wegener to Wladimir Köppen from 6/7 July 1911 . Deutsches Museum München Handschriftensammlung 596/7 N 1/7, W 024-1911.

Wegener , A. , 1911c : Thermodynamik der Atmosphäre ( Thermodynamics of the Atmosphere ) . Johann Ambrosius Barth , 331 pp.

Wegener , A. , 1911d : Über den Urspring der Tromben (On the origin of tornadoes) . Meteor. Z. , 28 , 201 – 209 .

Wegener , A. , 1912a : Die Entstehung der Kontinente (The emergence of continents) . Geol. Rundsch. , 3 , 276 – 292 , https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02202896 .

Wegener , A. , 1912b : Über turbulente Bewegungen in der Atmosphäre (On the turbulent motion in the atmosphere) . Meteor. Z. , 29 , 49 – 59 .

Wegener , A. , 1915a : Letter from Alfred Wegener to Wladimir Köppen from 13 July 1915 . Deutsches Museum München Handschriftensammlung 1968 559/8 N 1/54, W 016-1915.

Wegener , A. , 1915b : Letter from Alfred Wegener to Wladimir Köppen from 30 July 1915 . Deutsches Museum München Handschriftensammlung 1968 599/9 N 1/55, W 018-1915.

Wegener , A. , 1915c : Letter from Alfred Wegener to Wladimir Köppen from 7 August 1915 . Deutsches Museum München Handschriftensammlung 1968 599/9 N 1/55, W 019-1915.

Wegener , A. , 1915d : Über den Farbenwechsel der Meteore (On the flaring of the meteors) . Das Wetter , Sonderheft (Aßmann Festschrift), 62 – 66 .

Wegener , A. , 1915e : Zur Frage der atmosphärische Mondgezeiten (On the question of lunar atmospheric tides) . Meteor. Z. , 32 , 253 – 258 .

Wegener , A. , 1916a : Letter from Alfred Wegener to Wladimir Köppen from 11 March 1916 . Deutsches Museum München Handschriftensammlung 1968 600/2 N 1/59, W 002-1916.

Wegener , A. , 1916b : Letter from Alfred Wegener to Wladimir Köppen from 30 March 1916 . Deutsches Museum München Handschriftensammlung 1968 600/3 N 1/60, W 003-1916.

Wegener , A. , 1916c : Letter from Alfred Wegener to Wladimir Köppen from 12 July 1916 . Deutsches Museum München Handschriftensammlung 1968 600/8 N 1/65, W 0010-1916.

Wegener , A. , 1916d : Letter from Alfred Wegener to Wladimir Köppen from 2 February 1916 . Deutsches Museum München Handschriftensammlung 1968 600/1 N 1/58, W 001-1916.

Wegener , A. , 1916e : Letter from Alfred Wegener to Wladimir Köppen from 6 April 1916 . Deutsches Museum München Handschriftensammlung 1968 600/4 N 1/61, W 006-1916.

Wegener , A. , 1917 : Wind- und Wasserhosen in Europa ( Tornadoes and Waterspouts in Europe ) . Vieweg , 301 pp.

Wegener , A. , 1921 : Die Entstehung der Mondkrater ( The Origin of Moon Craters ) . Friedrich Vieweg and Son , 48 pp.

Wegener , A. , 1925a : Das detonierende Meteor vom 3 April 1916. 3 1/2 Uhr nachmittags in Kurhessen (The detonating meteor from 3 April 1916 at 3 1/2 in the afternoon in Kurhessen). Schr. Ges. Beförderung Gesamten Naturwiss . Marburg , 14 , 1 – 83 .

Wegener , A. , 1925b : Die Temperatur der obersten Atmosphärenschichten (The temperature of the uppermost atmospheric layers) . Arch. Dtsch. Seewarte , 42 , 402 – 405 .

Wegener , A. , 1925c : Theorie der Haupthalos (Theory of the main halos) . Arch. Dtsch. Seewarte , 2 , 1 – 32 .

Wegener , A. , 1928 : Beiträge zur Mechanik der Tromben und Tornados (Contributions to the mechanics of vortices and tornadoes) . Meteor. Z. , 45 , 201 – 214 .

Weyher , C. L. , 1889 : Sur les Tourbillons, Trombes, Tempêtes et Sphères Tournantes: Etude et Expériences ( On Whirlwinds, Tornadoes, Thunderstorms and Rotating Spheres: Studies and Experiments ) . Gauthier-Villars et Fils , 128 pp.

Alfred Wegener (1880–1930), photo taken probably in Marburg around 1910. [Photo courtesy of Bildarchiv Foto Marburg Aufnahme 426.293 via Wikipedia Commons (accessed on 8 Apr 2018).]

Alfred Wegener photograph taken in Nov 1914 in Berlin by Bruno Brügner. Wegener is wearing the Iron Cross 2nd Class awarded for his bravery and wounding during the battle of Namur, Belgium (23 Aug 1914), and the assault of Puisieux, France (4 Oct 1914) (M. Greene 2017, personal communication). Today, the medal is at the Alfred Wegener Institute in Bremerhaven, Germany (courtesy of Deutsches Museum, Munich, Archive, PT_03918_01_b-01).

The spatial distribution of tornado reports in Europe based on the data collected by Wegener (1917) between 1456 and 1913. The percentage of tornado reports for each country (shaded according to the scale) is shown as the percentage from the total number of reports [i.e., 258 reports; adapted from Fig. 3 in Antonescu et al. (2016) ].

(a) The monthly and (b) the diurnal occurrence of tornadoes from Antonescu et al. (2016, their Figs. 5 and 7) for northern (red line), western (green line), southern (orange line), and eastern Europe (gray line) and from Wegener (1917; black line). The majority (i.e., 69%) of tornadoes from Wegener (1917, his Figs. 15 and 16) were reported over western Europe (i.e., France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland, and Austria).

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100 Years Later: Reflecting on Alfred Wegener’s Contributions to Tornado Research in Europe

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Alfred Wegener (1880–1930) was a leading geophysicist, atmospheric scientist, and an Arctic explorer who is mainly remembered today for his contributions to the theory of continental drift. Less well known are his contributions to research on tornadoes in Europe. Published 100 years ago, book Wind- und Wasserhosen in Europa ( Tornadoes and Waterspouts in Europe ) is an impressive synthesis of knowledge on tornadoes and is considered the first modern pan-European tornado climatology, with 258 reports from 1456 to 1913. Unfortunately, Wegener’s book was overlooked after the 1950s amid declining interest in tornadoes by European researchers and meteorologists. The recent revival of tornado studies in Europe invites a reflection on Wegener’s book. Using a relatively small dataset, Wegener was able to describe characteristics of tornadoes (e.g., direction of movement, speed, rotation, formation mechanism), as well as their frequency of occurrence and climatology, comparable with the results from modern tornado climatologies. Wegener’s lasting scientific contributions to tornado research are presented in the context of European research on this topic. Specifically, his book showed the utility of reports from citizen scientists and inspired other researchers, namely, Johannes Letzmann, who continued to study European tornadoes after Wegener’s death.

* CURRENT AFFILIATION: A ntonescu —Remote Sensing Department, National Institute of Research and Development for Optoelectronics INOE 2000, Măgurele, Romania

** ADDITIONAL AFFILIATIONS: A ntonescu —European Severe Storms Laboratory, Wessling, Germany; R icketts —National Centre for Atmospheric Science, University of Manchester, Manchester, United Kingdom

© 2019 American Meteorological Society. For information regarding reuse of this content and general copyright information, consult the AMS Copyright Policy ( www.ametsoc.org/PUBSReuseLicenses ).

Alfred Wegener not only proposed the theory of continental drift but was also a pioneer of modern tornado research in Europe.

Alfred Wegener (1880–1930; Fig. 1 ) is mainly remembered today for his contributions to continental drift from which the modern theory of plate tectonics—“one of the key scientific concepts of the past century” ( Greene 2015 )—is derived ( Romano and Cifelli 2015 ). Wegener not only made major contributions to geology and geophysics but also to astronomy and geodesy ( Wegener 1905 ; he was an astronomer by training), glaciology ( Koch and Wegener 1911 ; he was a pioneer explorer of Greenland), paleoclimatology ( Köppen and Wegener 1924 ), and meteoritics ( Wegener 1925a ). He performed research in atmospheric physics and meteorology, including cloud microphysics (e.g., Wegener–Bergeron–Findeisen process; Wegener 1910 ), thermodynamics ( Wegener 1911c ), the vertical structure of the chemical composition of the atmosphere (e.g., Wegener 1925b ), and atmospheric optics (e.g., a subhelic arc is named the Wegener arc; Wegener 1925c ).

Citation: Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society 100, 4; 10.1175/BAMS-D-17-0316.1

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Lesser known are his contributions to the study of tornadoes. In 1917, Wegener published the seminal book Wind- und Wasserhosen in Europa ( Tornadoes and Waterspouts in Europe ). This book not only contains the first pan-European tornado climatology but is an exhaustive treatise on all aspects of tornadoes, from the weather associated with tornadoes, tornado rotation, and damage paths to the noise, smell, and electrical phenomena accompanying tornadoes. Wegener wrote the book between January and August 1916 “in the field” during the First World War with limited access to publications and data. But his meticulous working style led to a dataset of 258 tornadoes between 1456 and 1913 and a climatology that is comparable to modern ones.

Wegener’s book received relatively little attention at the time of its publication despite being, as a reviewer from the United States wrote in 1920, “a monograph [that] very satisfactorily fills in a missing chapter of modern meteorological science” and that “merits [a] careful study” ( Ward 1920 , p. 218). One such careful student of the book was the Estonian-born meteorologist Johannes Letzmann (1885–1971), another pioneer researcher on tornadoes in Europe, whose career was inspired by Wegener’s book. 1 Thus, during a period (1883–1937) in which the word “tornado” was banned for weather warnings by the U.S. Weather Bureau and its predecessor the U.S. Army Signal Service ( Galway 1985 ), Wegener and his collaborators were actively researching tornadoes across the Atlantic in Europe (e.g., Wegener 1928 ; Letzmann 1931 ; Letzmann and Koschmieder 1937 ). Unfortunately, because of the relative isolation of German scientists and the declining interest of both researchers and meteorologists in European tornadoes after the Second World War, Wegener’s book and articles on tornadoes were almost forgotten. The purpose of this article is to tell the story of Wind- und Wasserhosen in Europa in the context of European research on tornadoes and thus bring greater exposure to the pioneering tornado research of Alfred Wegener. To understand the importance of Wegener’s study, we need first to look at the history of tornado research in Europe.

There is a long history of tornado observations in Europe and of natural philosophers, starting with Aristotle, who attempted to explain their formation. The systematic study of tornadoes began in the seventeenth century (e.g., Peterson 1982 ; Antonescu 2017 ), and the first efforts to develop a pan-European tornado climatology date back to the nineteenth century ( Antonescu et al. 2016 ). In 1840, Jean Charles Athanase Peltier (1785–1845), a French physicist who is credited with the discovery of the thermoelectric effect (i.e., Peltier effect), published a book-length study on tornadoes and waterspouts ( Peltier 1840 ). Peltier became interested in tornadoes when a tornado produced substantial damage in Châtenay-en-France, France, on 18 June 1839 [most likely an enhanced Fujita scale (EF) 4 tornado; Keraunos 2018 ]. Given his expertise in electricity and meteorology, Peltier was asked by a certain Monsieur Hérelle, whose property was destroyed by the tornado, to determine “the real character of this phenomenon” as his insurance company would only cover damages associated with electrical phenomena (e.g., cloud-to-ground lightning; Peltier 1847 ). On 28 October 1839, Peltier presented a summary of his findings before the French Academy of Sciences, in which he argued that “everything proves the tornado to be nothing else than a conductor formed of clouds, which serves as a passage for a continual discharge of electricity” ( Peltier 1840 ). His conclusion that tornadoes are an electrical phenomenon supported a popular hypothesis at the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth century. In his attempt to prove that the electrical hypothesis was the only one able to explain the formation of tornadoes, Peltier (1840) collected 91 reports of tornadoes and waterspouts that occurred in Europe between 1456 and 1839 and thus developed the first pan-European tornado climatology.

The French botanist Charles Martins (1806–99) published the first instructions for conducting tornado damage surveys ( Martins 1849 ), which was translated into German a year later ( Martins 1850 ). These instructions—together with an increase in the number of tornado reports during the nineteenth century (from 403 reports between 1800 and 1849 to 900 reports between 1850 and 1899; Antonescu et al. 2016 )—showed that European researchers and meteorologists had taken an active interest in collecting tornado reports during this period. Toward the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century, research focused on tornado damage surveys (e.g., Hepites 1887 ; Mohorovičić 1892 ), theoretical aspects ( Reye 1872 ), and laboratory experiments ( Weyher 1889 ). Unfortunately, no other efforts were made to continue pan-European data collection on tornadoes despite the development of national meteorological services and severe weather databases across Europe during this period ( Antonescu et al. 2016 ). Enter the scene, Alfred Wegener.

This morning we saw multiple waterspouts hanging down from a stratocumulus deck. They appeared to be a lot more peaceful than the ones in Europe. I photographed them and prompted Bertelsen to draw them as well as Koch and Lundager to photograph them with their cameras. So, a big waterspout [ skypumper in Danish] photography competition — “All hands to the pumps!” {“ Alle Man til Pumperne! ” [sic] in Danish} as Friis said when he saw this. Then I went out with both cameras (with newly loaded plates) and photographed some subjects.

This experience indicates that, even before the beginning of the First World War, Wegener was already interested in tornadoes and waterspouts. In December 1910, in parallel with putting the finishing touches on his book Thermodynamik der Atmosphäre ( Thermodynamics of the Atmosphere ; Wegener 1911c ), in which he included a short section on tornadoes, Wegener also finished a study on the origin of tornadoes ( Wegener 1911d ). In this study, Wegener argued that Tromben (singular Trombe ), a general term describing all types of whirlwinds (e.g., dust devils, tornadoes, waterspouts) are the descending part of the gust front and are not caused by the heating of the surface layer as was hypothesized by the German mathematician Theodor Reye (1838–1919; Reye 1872 ). Wegener’s argument against Reye’s hypothesis was a simple one—“neither cumulus clouds rotate [around a vertical axis] nor does the rising smoke of a cigar,” and if cumulus clouds are rotating, their rotation is weak and is not enough to lead to the strong rotation of a tornado ( Wegener 1911d , p. 205). Wegener’s hypothesis was that tornadoes were associated with the wirbelfaden (vortex filaments) that form along the gust front. The hypothesis was based on observations of a tornado that occurred at Oldenburg, Germany, on 5 July 1890. The observations were collected and analyzed by the German climatologist Wladimir Köppen (1846–1940), Wegener’s mentor and father-in-law, as well as one of the major figures in meteorology at the beginning of the twentieth century. Wegener’s hypothesis was also based on photographs published by Frank H. Bigelow (1851–1924), a professor of meteorology in the U.S. Weather Bureau, showing the evolution of a waterspout that occurred off the coast of Cottage City (now Oak Bluffs), Massachusetts, on 19 August 1896 ( Bigelow 1906 ). Using the observations of the Oldenburg tornado, Wegener also speculated that tornadoes formed on the right flank of the precipitation region. This happens, according to Wegener, because the wind turns to the right with increasing height in the Northern Hemisphere, causing the volume of precipitation to be rotated to the right with increasing height. Thus, the gust front would grow on the right flank and disappear on the left flank of the storm ( Wegener 1911c , p. 209). Wegener concluded that he did not have enough observations to transform his hypothesis into a theory, but “it remains for the future to provide the definitive, strict proof” ( Wegener 1911c , p. 209).

By July 1911, Wegener’s interest in tornadoes evolved into a full-fledged research project, being mentioned among other research projects in a letter to Köppen ( Wegener 1911b ). Over the next year, Wegener’s research focused on the stratosphere ( Wegener 1911a ), continental drift ( Wegener 1912a ), turbulence ( Wegener 1912b ), meteoritics ( Wegener 1915d ), and lunar atmospheric tides (Wegener 1915e). Wegener would return to the study of tornadoes in 1915.

I think, by the way, that it is a weakness of all my work that I am forever going into too many side issues. I managed to cut out many of them from this book, but I should limit myself to an even greater extent to the straightforward establishment of the displacement.

This tendency for Wegener to diverge from the main topic in his writings sometimes resulted in theoretical digressions and excessive speculation, a trait that had already been identified by both the Austrian meteorologist Felix Exner (1876–1930) in his review of Thermodynamik der Atmosphäre and Köppen in his letter about the manuscript on the displacement theory. This research approach was due to Wegener’s belief that new ideas are not so much rooted from theoretical work as from “careful empirical work” ( Greene 2015 , p. 343). By the end of July 1915, as Wegener was determined to correct these tendencies, he was able to find a project that fit this purpose. He wanted to return to the study of tornadoes, “not necessarily [a subject] á la mode.” In this project, he could work only with empirical data and without any speculation ( Wegener 1915a ). In a letter to Köppen dated 30 July ( Wegener 1915b ), Wegener provided the first details of this new project for which he “already [had] collected a series of interesting observations and each day I’ve been collecting new material from the literature.” From the start, he was planning to write a book on tromben that would include “all the important descriptions word for word and with the original illustrations,” short reports about the less important events, and a summary of the existing hypotheses on tornado formation, which would also include his opinions ( Wegener 1915a ).

Wegener thought that such a book, mainly containing descriptions of tornadoes in Europe without any theoretical speculation, could be read by both professional meteorologists and also by the general public ( Wegener 1915c ). This approach for studying tornadoes in Europe was used before, for example, by Peltier (1840) , who selected reports that supported his hypothesis that tornadoes are electrical phenomena, and by Reye (1872) , who included depictions of tornadoes that were “a lot more unnatural than the originals” ( Wegener 1915a ). Wegener’s aim was to develop a catalog that would include original descriptions and depictions of tornadoes and waterspouts, based on which he would construct a climatology and would search for commonalities (e.g., origin, direction of movement, speed, rotation). As indicated by Greene (2015, p. 344), Wegener was familiar with this research approach. For example, Wegener had developed a catalog of historical observations of the motion of the moon going back to the thirteenth century that he used in his dissertation in astronomy ( Wegener 1905 ); he also collected and analyzed historical observations of the color change of meteorites entering the terrestrial atmosphere in a study on the chemical layering of the upper atmosphere ( Wegener 1915d ).

WRITING WIND- UND WASSERHOSEN IN EUROPA : 1916.

By January 1916, Wegener was the commanding officer of Field Weather Station 12, one of the weather stations of the Field Weather Service of the German army ( Greene 2015 , p. 346). The station was located on the Western Front at Mülhausen (today in France and known as Mulhouse but in 1916 a part of the German Empire). As a commanding officer with the only responsibility of taking routine weather observations, Wegener devoted his free time to his meteorological research. Thus, the plan to write the book on tornadoes in Europe started to materialize.

In a letter addressed to Köppen from early February 1916, Wegener mentioned that he was continuing his empirical investigations on tornadoes where he was making new discoveries every day and that the source materials were challenging to go through ( Wegener 1916d ). Gathering source material for a catalog of all past European tornadoes was not easy as Wegener had access only to the collections of the library at the University of Freiburg, Germany. Because of the frequent rail service—Mülhausen was an important administrative center of the German army on the Western Front—Wegener also obtained publications from Köppen from the library of the German Marine Observatory in Hamburg. The meteorologists Julius von Hann (1839–1921) in Vienna and Gustav Hellmann (1854–1939) in Berlin were also able to help Wegener by providing some of the more obscure references on tornadoes ( Greene 2015 , p. 347).

At the beginning of March, besides working on collecting descriptions of European tornadoes, Wegener started negotiations with his publisher, Vieweg Verlag. The editor wanted to include Wegener’s book in a popular science collection. This meant that Wegener’s book, with the provisional title Die Großtromben Europas ( The Tornadoes of Europe ), would not be a thorough scientific study but rather a book for a general audience ( Wegener 1916a ). Wegener’s letters to Köppen from late March showed that Wegener was struggling to organize his material, which by now contained more descriptions than he was planning to include in the manuscript ( Wegener 1916b ). The variety of descriptions in different languages, and spanning multiple centuries, resulted in difficulties in organizing the material and extracting accurate descriptions.

Despite these problems, and despite his intentions to avoid speculation and theorizing, Wegener started to draw some conclusions concerning the geographical distribution of tornadoes in Europe (Wegener 1916e). First, tornadoes often formed leeward of hills. Second, at the northern foot of the Pyrenees (mainly in the eastern half) and in Sweden, tornadoes seemed to be more frequently observed compared with other regions of Europe. Third, in the United States, “the storms in Spring are rich in tornadoes and the storms on Autumn are poor in tornadoes; [i]n Europe it is the other way around” (Wegener 1916e). Wegener was speculating that this difference in the annual distribution of tornadoes in the United States and Europe “has something to do with the fact that America has the ocean to the east and Europe has it to the west” (Wegener 1916e).

At the end of April, Wegener was back home in Marburg for Easter. He soon learned about an event, which is known today as the Treysa meteor, that occurred on 3 April in Hesse, a state in central Germany. Knowing Wegener’s prior interest in meteors ( Wegener 1915d ), Franz Richarz (1860–1920) and Emanuel Kayser (1845–1927), both professors at the University of Marburg, asked for his help to find the location of the meteorite. Based on eyewitness reports, Richarz and Kayser hypothesized that the area where the meteorite fell was close to Marburg. Finding the location of the meteorite not only gave Wegener the opportunity to pursue his interest in this subject but also to understand how eyewitness reports made by citizen scientists could be used for scientific research. This was the essence of his catalog of tornadoes, a collection of observations made mainly by untrained observers that Wegener used to understand the occurrence of this phenomenon in Europe.

Plotting newspaper accounts of the meteorite on a map, Wegener was able to obtain a rough estimate of the landing site. At the beginning of May, he requested an extension of his leave to collect more information about the meteorite. Being approved, he traveled around Treysa and conducted more than 100 interviews during 9–12 May. Putting together all this information, he was able to estimate the landing site 125 km away from Treysa. According to Greene (2015, p. 350), Wegener’s paper on the Treysa meteorite ( Wegener 1925a ) was “one of the most polished and thorough pieces of work he [Wegener] ever did.” Indeed, the meteorite was later discovered on 5 March 1917, very close to his calculated location.

With these new insights on the utility of reports made by citizen scientists, Wegener returned to Mülhausen in May, making steady progress on the book throughout May and June. In July, the British army started an offensive, and Wegener and his staff were moved to a holding location closer to the front ( Greene 2015 , p. 354). The Battle of the Somme, fought between July and November 1916, was the largest battle on the Western Front and one of the costliest of World War I. As the British and French offensive was stopped, Wegener returned to Mülhausen (“still situated next to the war, away from the action”) and to his working routine. By the second week of July, Wegener was able to send to Köppen the third part of the manuscript. At this point, the only missing chapter from the book was the one containing the hypotheses on the formation of tornadoes ( Wegener 1916c ). The book was finished “in the field” (as indicated in the preface) in August 1916 and, because of wartime paper shortages in Germany, published one year later.

WIND- UND WASSERHOSEN IN EUROPA : 1917.

Wind- und Wasserhosen in Europa began with a chapter in which Wegener discusses the definition of tornadoes. Wegener considered tornadoes and waterspouts [i.e., Großtromben (tornadoes)] as a distinct phenomenon situated between cyclones and dust devils ( Table 1 ). He then defined tornadoes as rotating columns of air stretching from a cumulonimbus cloud to the ground and visible as a cone of condensed water vapor. This chapter on definitions and terminology was followed by a chapter containing detailed descriptions from the literature of 11 tornadoes that occurred between 1535 and 1890. The next chapter was the core of the book, a catalog containing descriptions and references for 258 tornadoes and waterspouts ( Wegener 1917 , 58–83). Given that Wegener had limited access to scientific literature because of the war, it is not surprising that the tornado reports were mainly over western Europe ( Fig. 3 ).

Table of contents of Wind- und Wasserhosen in Europa (Tornadoes and Waterspouts in Europe).

Almost 100 years since the publication of Wegener (1917) , Antonescu et al. (2016) have revised and updated Wegener’s study on tornadoes in Europe. Antonescu et al. (2016 , 2017) were able to retrieve information on tornado occurrence for a more geographically diverse area and thus fill the gaps in Wegener (1917) . Antonescu et al. (2016) showed that 2,096 tornadoes were reported in 27 countries between 855 and 1919 compared with 258 reports from 14 countries between 1456 and 1913 in the dataset developed by Wegener. Wegener estimated that at least 100 tornadoes occurred each year in Europe. This is an underestimation when compared with results from modern climatologies (i.e., 242 tornadoes per year between 2000 and 2014; Antonescu et al. 2016 ). Wegener compared his results for the climatology of European tornadoes with a contemporary climatology of U.S. tornadoes developed by John Park Finley (1854–1943; Finley 1887 ), an American meteorologist and Army Signal Service officer who was the first to study U.S. tornadoes intensively ( Galway 1985 ). Specifically, Wegener showed that, whereas 35 tornadoes were reported in Europe between 1884 and 1887, 777 tornadoes were reported in the United States during a similar interval (1883–86).

Based on his dataset, Wegener showed that the European tornadoes mainly occurred in June–August, with a peak in July ( Fig. 4a ). That majority (i.e., 69%) of the reports from Wegener’s dataset are for tornadoes that occurred in countries from western Europe (i.e., France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland, Austria). Thus, his results are similar with a monthly distribution of tornadoes over western Europe (i.e., June–August, with a peak in July). According to Wegener (1917) , tornadoes were reported more frequently between 1400 and 1800 central European time (CET; UTC + 1 h), with a peak between 1600 and 1800 UTC compared with other times of the day. For western Europe, Antonescu et al. (2016) identified a maximum between 1200 and 1800 UTC, with a peak between 1400 and 1600 UTC.

The remainder of the book was devoted to the analysis of different aspects of tornadoes, including the weather conditions associated with tornadoes (chapter 5; tornadoes were generally reported east-southeast of the cyclone center), their rotation (chapter 9; of the 25 tornado reports in which the direction of rotation was reported, 18 were cyclonic and 7 anticyclonic), and their associated damages (chapter 14; European tornadoes were less damaging compared with the U.S. tornadoes, and fatalities were reported only in 5% of all analyzed reports).

The last chapter, “Ansichten über die Entstehung der Tromben” (Views on the Formation of Whirlwinds), discusses a hypothesis on tornado formation. The only hypothesis that Wegener said could explain the formation of tornadoes was the mechanical or the hydrodynamic hypothesis, a hypothesis that can be traced back to Lucretius (99–circa 55 BC) and further to Aristotle (384–322 BC). As stated by Wegener, “the temperature conditions are not considered the primary cause and the rotation the effect, but the rotation, whether produced mechanically or hydrodynamically, is believed to be the cause of the thermodynamic effects, the latter manifesting themselves in the condensation of the funnel cloud” [ Wegener (1917) ; translated from German by Ward (1920) ].

Toward the end of the First World War, Wegener was reassigned to the Eastern Front as a commanding officer of the Central Meteorological Station in Sofia, Bulgaria, and then in July 1918 back to the Western Front ( Greene 2015 , 371–380). In October 1918, Wegener moved to Dorpat (today Tartu) in Estonia where the German army had opened the University of Dorpat, thus allowing some of the German soldiers to continue their studies. Wegener stayed at the University of Dorpat for about a month while the German army evacuated the Baltic countries after the armistice on 11 November 1918. There is one aspect of his stay in Dorpat that had great consequences for his study of tornadoes in Europe—there, Wegener met Johannes Letzmann (1885–1971), an Estonian meteorologist who was interested in storms and who developed a climatology of tornadoes for the Baltic region ( Letzmann 1920 ). Under Wegener’s mentorship, Letzmann became even more interested in tornadoes ( Peterson 1992a ; Lüdecke et al. 2000 ). Unfortunately, after November 1918, Wegener and Letzmann stopped their collaboration for almost 10 years because Wegener’s research interest in tornadoes faded after returning to Marburg (e.g., Wegener published a book on the origin of moon craters; Wegener 1921 ).

Letzmann remained at the University of Dorpat, studying Wegener’s book and continuing his own research on tornadoes. In June 1927, he wrote to Wegener expressing his interest to move to Austria and work with him. Letzmann also mentioned that Wegener’s book had inspired him to collect tornado observations for the Baltic area and also to conduct theoretical and experimental work on tornadoes. Letzmann’s letter arrived at a very good time. Wegener’s interest in tornadoes had just been reawakened by a tornado that occurred on 23 September 1927 near Graz, Austria. Wegener and his wife Else investigated this tornado by walking along the tornado path and talking with the eyewitnesses. Consequently, Wegener agreed to Letzmann’s proposal for collaboration, and starting in 1928, they worked together at the University of Graz where Wegener was a professor.

Their research was focused on finding the mechanism responsible for tornado formation. Wegener was working on a hypothesis that tornadoes were associated with what he called a Mutterwirbel (mother vortex), a vortex tube tilted by the updraft of the thunderstorm. He speculated that this vortex tube would have a cyclonic tornado at one end and an anticyclonic tornado at the other end connected by a horizontal section of the vortex ( Wegener 1928 ; Peterson 1992b ). Letzmann and Wegener worked on this hypothesis. They also tried to collect observations, in particular, of the anticyclonic and horizontal part of the vortex tube, that would confirm their hypothesis ( Peterson 1992b ; Greene 2015 ). Unfortunately, their collaboration ended because of the tragic death of Wegener in November 1930 during his fourth expedition to Greenland.

During the 1930s, Letzmann became one of the leading figures on tornado research with an interest in the theory of vortex dynamics, analyses of historical tornado events, tornado damage investigations, and laboratory simulations ( Dotzek et al. 2005 ). In 1937, at the invitation of the World Meteorological Organization, Letzmann and German meteorologist Harald Koschmieder (1897–1966) published extensive guidelines for the investigation of tornadic phenomena. Unfortunately, these guidelines were initially neglected by the meteorological community, only to be revived four decades later when researchers from the United States started to actively research tornadoes as recommended by Letzmann and Koschmieder ( Peterson 1992a ).

After the end of the Second World War, Letzmann lost his position at the University of Graz and over the next decades faced a difficult personal situation ( Dotzek et al. 2005 ). By the time of his death in 1971, his research on tornadoes had been forgotten both in Europe and in the United States.

After the 1950s, the lack of researchers or meteorologists working on this topic led to a decline in European tornado research. After 2000, however, interest was revived, mainly because of the efforts of Nikolai Dotzek (1966–2010), who founded the European Severe Storms Laboratory, in part for the purpose of collecting and verifying tornado reports from a pan-European perspective ( Feuerstein and Groenemeijer 2011 ; Groenemeijer et al. 2017 ).

Today, Alfred Wegener is largely recognized for being the first to propose a complete theory for continental drift. During his lifetime, however, Wegener was mainly known as a polar explorer and as an atmospheric scientist. We argue that Wegener should also be remembered for his contributions to the study of tornadoes. As recognized by Greene (2015, p. 600), Wegener’s book is the only one of his publications that is still cited in the twenty-first century more as a piece of research and less as a piece of history. The isolation of German scientists after the First World War and the decline of the German language as an international language of science (e.g., Gordin 2015 ) had a great impact on the scientific legacy of Wegener. For example, there are no translations of Wegener (1917) , as far as we know.

The story of Wind- und Wasserhosen in Europa is not a surprising one and does not have, to a certain extent, elements of an inspiring story, but “it is Wegener’s way [research style] from one end to the other” (M. Greene 2017, personal communication). Wegener thought that his research on tornadoes would be useful for three main reasons (M. Greene 2017, personal communication). First, Wegener had the tendency in his scientific work to go into details about side issues and to include speculations based on empirical observations. He wanted to correct this tendency with his book on tornadoes in Europe by focusing on a single subject without any theoretical speculations. Second, from his investigations into the Treysa meteor, Wegener realized the utility of observations made by citizen scientists, which were the sources of most of the tornado and waterspout reports in his catalog. Third, as a commander of one of the German army field weather stations, Wegener was away from the front, allowing him access to publications from German libraries and free time to work on his research.

Wegener’s research on tornadoes in Europe was continued by Johannes Letzmann. After the 1960s, however, both Wegener’s and Letzmann’s research remained in the background of tornado research in Europe, to be rediscovered after the 1990s, when the interest in European tornadoes increased (e.g., Antonescu et al. 2016 ). With this article, we hope to celebrate a part of Wegener’s lesser-known scientific legacy with the meteorological community, especially outside Europe.

There was a long history of tornado research in Europe before the beginning of the twentieth century when Wegener started to study tornadoes. Wegener (1917) synthesized all the known research that occurred in Europe, as well as a catalog of all known tornadoes and waterspouts in Europe before 1915. Then he meticulously constructed the first pan-European climatology for Europe. One hundred years later, the pan-European tornado climatology was updated following a methodology similar to the one used by Wegener ( Antonescu et al. 2016 ) and shows remarkable confirmation of Wegener’s results (e.g., monthly distribution, diurnal distribution).

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We are indebted to Mott T. Greene, John B. Magee Professor of Science and Values Emeritus at the University of Puget Sound and affiliate professor of Earth and Space Sciences at the University of Washington, who wrote the definitive biography on Alfred Wegener. That book provided essential details about Wegener’s life and research that made this article possible. We also have benefited considerably from discussions with and comments from Prof. Greene. We thank Dr. Bent Nielsen from the Danish Arctic Institute for providing information about the Danish Danmark expedition, in particular about the photographic diary of Andreas Lundager. Antonescu and Ricketts have received funding for this research from the University of Manchester School of Earth and Environmental Sciences Research Fund. Funding for Antonescu and Schultz was provided by the Risk Prediction Initiative of the Bermuda Institute of Ocean Sciences through Grant RPI2.0-2016-SCHULTZ. Partial funding for Antonescu was provided by the AXA Research Fund to the University of Manchester for the “Assessing the Threat of Severe Convective Storms across Europe” project and from the Romanian Ministry of Research and Innovation throughout the Core National Programme 33N/16.03.2018. Partial funding for Schultz was provided by the Natural Environment Research Council to the University of Manchester through Grants NE/H008225/1, NE/I005234/1, and NE/N003918/1. We thank the Archiv Deutsches Museum for providing access to Alfred Wegener’s correspondence with Wladimir Köppen.

The interest of the first author of this article on the climatology of tornadoes in Romania, and later on European tornadoes, originated from a sentence in Wind- und Wasserhosen in Europa ( Wegener 1917 , p. 73) describing a tornado that occurred in Bucharest, Romania, on 9 June 1886 ( Hepites 1887 ).

Aage Bertelsen (1873–1945) was a Danish painter and one of the Danmark expedition’s artists. Johan Peter Koch (1870–1928), a Danish captain and explorer, was the expedition’s cartographer. Andreas Lundager (1869–1940) was the expedition’s botanist, and Achton Friis (1871–1916), another of the expedition’s artists, published a book in 1909 about the expedition ( Friis 1913 ).

A note by Andreas Lundager retrieved from the archives of the Danish Arctic Institute suggests that the two photographic plates mentioned by Wegener “were impossible, it’s fair to say overexposed” ( Lundager 1907 , entry 61).

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Biography of alfred wegener.

Alfred Wegener (1880–1930) became internationally known for his heavily disputed theory of continental drift, which he formulated as early as 1912. Yet his exploration of Greenland, as well as his related work in glaciology and aerology, also makes up a considerable part of his multifarious scientific career as a meteorologist and geophysicist.

Portrait of Alfred Wegener (1880–1930). Unknown photographer, n.d.

© Deutsches Museum, Archiv (BN_0414)

Used by permission.

The copyright holder reserves, or holds for their own use, all the rights provided by copyright law, such as distribution, performance, and creation of derivative works.

Wegener lived in a period of tremendous political and scientific upheaval and transformation. Born in Berlin, he grew up in the German Empire at a time that saw the advent of new technologies such as the airship, electricity and the automobile. At that time Max Planck and Albert Einstein were calling the fundamentals of modern physics into question. In addition, geophysics, meteorology, and glaciology were changing into modern, globally oriented disciplines.

While his father was a theologian and classics teacher, Alfred and his older brother Kurt (1878–1964) were more inclined towards the natural sciences. Wegener studied mathematics and astronomy in Berlin and Heidelberg, but soon was drawn to geophysics and meteorology. Alfred, like his brother, enjoyed hiking, mountain climbing, and sailing. After the completion of his PhD in astronomy, he went together with his brother Kurt to the aeronautical observatory, the “Königlich Preußisches Aeronautische Observatorium Lindenberg” close to Berlin. Together they participated in ballooning and conducted meteorological observations in the new discipline of aerology. Together they set a world record for the longest time spent aloft in a balloon, remaining in the air for 52 hours from 5 to 7 April 1906. The experiences with kites and balloons as a meteorologist in the new field of aerology at Lindenberg gave him the unexpected opportunity to participate in the Danish Danmark Expedition to Greenland from 1906–1908.

Wegener’s publications in the field of geophysics are remarkable because they are often based on intuitive insights and careful observations and encompass very different fields—the origins of continents and oceans, paleoclimatology, aerology, meteorology and atmospheric sciences, origins of craters on the moon, aurora and wind phenomena in the polar regions, or the origins of tornados and turbulence phenomena, and similar matters.

His close relationship with the climatologist Wladimir Köppen (1846–1940), whom he met at the kite station in Hamburg Großborstel in 1906 and would become his father-in-law, was very important for his further life and career. They discussed Wegener’s ideas intensively. In 1911 Wegener formulated his ideas about the origins of oceans and continents for the first time. Also in this case it was an intuitive insight and immediate observation that made him think about the origins of continental movements. A letter from Wegener to Köppen, preserved at the Deutsches Museum, documents his ideas:

Marburg, 6 December 1911. Dear Father, I must answer your lengthy letter straightaway. I do believe that you consider my ancient continent to be far more fantastic than it really is and you do not yet see that it’s merely a matter of interpreting the observation material. Even if I only arrived at the idea due to the correspondence between the coastlines, the documentation will naturally have to be based on material from geological observation. —Letter of Alfred Wegener to his father-in-law, Wladimir Köppen, Marburg, 6 December 1911, DMA, HS 1968-596, 17.

Marburg, 6.12.1911. Lieber Vater, auf Deinen ausführlichen Brief muß ich Dir gleich antworten. Ich glaube doch, Du hältst meinen Urkontinent für phantastischer als er ist und siehst noch nicht, daß es sich lediglich um Deutung des Beobachtungsmaterials handelt. Wenn ich auch nur durch die übereinstimmenden Küstenlinien darauf gekommen bin, so muß die Beweisführung natürlich von dem Beobachtungsmaterial der Geologie ausgehen. —Brief von Alfred Wegener an seinen Schwiegervater Wladimir Köppen, Marburg, 06.12.1911, DMA, HS 1968-596, 17.

Portrait of Alfred Wegener (1880–1930). German meteorologist and important contributor to the theory of continental drift. Unknown photographer, n.d.

© Deutsches Museum, Archiv (BN_30985)

On 6 January 1912, Wegener gave a courageous presentation at the annual meeting of the geological society ( Geologische Vereinigung ) at the Senckenberg Museum in Frankfurt. This talk then was published as an article in the renowned journal Petermanns Geographische Mitteilungen [Alfred Wegener: Die Entstehung der Kontinente. In: Petermanns Mitteilungen 1912, pp. 185–95, 253–56, and 305–09]. In 1915 these ideas were then published as a book, Über den Ursprung der Kontinente und Ozeane (On the Origins of the Continents and Oceans), which was revised several times. However, during his lifetime Wegener did not receive recognition for his ideas. Only later, in the context of the systematic exploration of the seafloor in the 1950s, did observations of the phenomenon of seafloor spreading prove his insights.

In his Greenland diaries the theory of continental drift is only mentioned once in a rather ironic self-reflection about the difficult circumstances of polar exploration:

We certainly won’t make it out of here today. And who knows how things will turn out tomorrow. One would think that this forced rest would encourage my mind to ponder, solve scientific questions, and to concentrate on things that I know I think about constantly when I am back home. But only once in a while do I find myself coming up with some unimpressive beginnings of ideas. All these problems, that of the volcanos, the cyclones, the blue strips in the ice, the daily fluctuation of the barometer, the rotation in the solar system, etc. are always with me; they are always sitting, so to speak, right in front of me, yet my imagination does not make it through, and instead chooses other paths. It persistently returns to two things, back and forth, and both are of a shamefully material nature: How will Else and I arrange things, and what kind of food will we cook? Note that the first question comes up primarily after our meals, the second before. I lack sufficient courage, otherwise I could write 2 disquisitions on these topics, in comparison with which the “Origin of Continents and Oceans” would look like an essay by a sixth-grader. — Danish North Greenland Expedition, 19 May 1913, DMA NL 001/010, 55–57.

In 1913 he married Else Köppen (the daughter of his mentor Wladimir Köppen), with whom he had three children. During World War I Wegener worked as a meteorologist. In addition to these duties, he found time to write his famous book on continental drift. After World War I the ambitious and by then well-known Wegener was still having trouble finding a professorship. At that time he held a position at the Hamburger Seewarte observatory, succeeding his father-in-law Wladimir Köppen as leader of the meteorological branch. In 1924 he accepted an offer from the University of Graz (Austria), where he spent fruitful years as an academic teacher and researcher. In the early 1920s, academic life was still disrupted by the consequences of World War I. It took several years until the newly founded Notgemeinschaft der Deutschen Wissenschaft could support prestigious expeditions in remote areas to explore the oceans ( Meteorexpedition 1925–1927), the Pamir mountains expedition (1928), or Wegener’s Greenland expeditions in 1929 and 1930–1931, which ended with the tragic death of Wegener and his companion, the Greenlander Rasmus Villumsen (1910–1930).

All in all, Wegener participated in four polar expeditions: the Danmark Expedition (1906–1908), the glaciological Danish North Greenland Expedition with Johann Peter Koch (1912), the pre-expedition (1929), documented neither in the Deutsches Museum archives nor in this virtual exhibition, and the German Greenland Expedition (1930–1931). He is well known as an expert on Greenland and for his close relations with the Inuit populations of Denmark and Greenland. Wegener was an experienced polar explorer and many of his scientific goals can be traced to the early expeditions where he was already starting to pursue glaciological and meteorological questions. Although his final expedition faced many difficulties and ended with his tragic death, it pursued an ambitious scientific program that served as a reference for subsequent international expeditions.

Today the German research institute for polar science and marine science is named the Alfred-Wegener-Institut für Polar- und Meeresforschung .

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The Wegener Diaries: Scientific Expeditions into the Eternal Ice

This virtual exhibition sheds light on Alfred Wegener’s expeditions to Greenland between 1906 and 1931. Its main focus is on the diaries Wegener wrote during his explorations, which offer unique insights into the manifold challenges man and material faced in Greenland’s extreme environments. You may choose to read the diaries in their original state, or browse the expeditions individually and read transcribed and translated excerpts by clicking on the individual chapters.

This version, published in 2020, includes minor updates to the original 2013 virtual exhibition . PDFs of the virtual exhibition, as well as original scans and transcripts of the Wegener Diaries, can be found at the exhibition’s PDF Depot.

About the author

Christian Kehrt works in the fields of environmental history, military history, and the history of science and technology. He studied history and philosophy in Tübingen and Stony Brook, NY. His PhD “Moderne Krieger. Die Technikerfahrungen deutscher Militärpiloten, 1910–1945” deals with flying experiences of military pilots in the age of the two world wars. It was completed as part of the postgraduate research program “Technology and Society” at the Technical University Darmstadt and received the Werner-Hahlweg-Prize for military history, the Georg-Agricola Prize and the prize for young scholars of the German Society for Aeronautics and Astronautics. As a postdoc he worked at the Deutsches Museum in Munich on a project on the origins of nanotechnology. In 2009/10 he was a Carson Fellow at the Rachel Center for Environment and Society. Currently he is pursuing a habilitation project on polar exploration in the period of the Cold War at the Helmut Schmidt University in Hamburg where he holds a position as a research associate.

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Did the Earth move for you? The man who first answered: ‘Yes’

Visionary scientist Alfred Wegener was ridiculed for his radical theory of continental drift. A century later, his icy grave proves his point

O ne hundred years ago, a German explorer and scientist published a work that would revolutionise our understanding of our planet. In The Origin of Continents and Oceans , Alfred Wegener proposed the radical idea that Earth’s continents had, hundreds of millions of years before, formed a vast single land mass that had subsequently broken apart, with those broken pieces eventually drifting to their current locations. Our world’s mountains, forests and civilisations rest on a bedrock that is not immutable but shifts, albeit very slowly, Wegener argued.

Other scientists had already mused on the possibility that the continents drift over geological time. But Wegener – who first outlined his theory at a scientific meeting in 1912 – took it seriously, collecting a mass of supporting evidence to support the book which, three years later, outlined the idea of continental drift to the public for the first time.

He noted the close resemblance of fossils of vertebrate animals and plants on opposite sides of oceans, and of the rock sequences that aligned the coasts of continents – for example western Africa and eastern South America. These similarities exist because these sites had once been contiguous, he claimed.

“At the time, scientists believed continents had been linked by land bridges over which species had spread but which had sunk and disappeared,” says palaeontologist Richard Cifelli, of Oklahoma University. “Wegener dismissed the idea of land bridges and argued instead that the continents had once been united.”

The trouble was that he could provide no mechanism to explain how continents drifted. As a result, his work was derided and ignored for decades with hostility that endured for half a century. David Attenborough recalls asking a geology lecturer at Cambridge in the late 40s why he was not giving lectures about continental drift. “The idea was moonshine, I was informed.”

Proof that Wegener was correct all along was not provided until the 1950s and 60s with the discovery of sea-floor spreading, which causes oceans like the Atlantic to expand. We now know that Earth’s outer shell is divided into several plates that glide over the mantle, the rocky inner layer that lies above our planet’s molten core. Some plates slowly move apart, and hot magma wells up through the gaps.

For example, the upwelling from the diverging Eurasian and North American tectonic plates is forcing Europe and America apart, and has created a mid-Atlantic ridge with Iceland near its apex. However, when plates push together, one is forced down – or subducted – below the other, creating regions that are often associated with intense vulcanism.

As for Wegener the scientist, his biographer, Mott Greene, describes the man as “friendly, informal, somewhat introverted and deeply committed to his work”. In the end, that commitment cost him his life. In 1930, he and a colleague, Rasmus Villumsen, were exploring in Greenland when Wegener dropped dead, probably of a heart attack. Villumsen buried his body and marked the grave with skis. (Villumsen then walked on to try reaching a nearby camp but was never seen again.)

A later expedition, led by Wegener’s brother Kurt, built a pyramid-shaped mausoleum round Alfred’s body, which over the years has become buried under layers of ice and snow.Intriguingly, his body, entombed in ice, has also sailed westwards at a rate of about two centimetres per year as it has been carried on the back of the North American tectonic plate.

As Cifelli, writing with Marco Romano, of Sapienza University of Rome, states in Nature this month : “Wegener would have been glad to know that his body will have travelled some 20 kilometres in a million years’ time – in accordance with his visionary theory.”

• Alfred Wegener: Science, Exploration and the Theory of Continental Drift by Mott T Greene is published by Johns Hopkins University Press on 29 October
• The Observer

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A big eye to search for extraterrestrial life, openmind books, scientific anniversaries, does laboratory meat have a future, featured author, latest book, wegener and his theory of continental drift that broke with geologists.

If there were a “geographical forecast”, analogous to the predictions of meteorologists, it would show how over the next 100 million years the Atlantic Ocean will continue to expand, until it is much larger than the Pacific. And also how Africa will merge with Europe, with the Mediterranean disappearing and a mountain range emerging in its place to compete with the Himalayas—although Everest and its neighbouring mountains will still continue to rise. If this sounds shocking today, you should put yourself in the shoes of geologists back in 1912, who were much more troubled when a 32-year-old German meteorologist, Alfred Wegener, launched his theory of continental drift. Thanks to his hypothesis, any child today knows that the continents are slowly moving and were joined together at the time when the dinosaurs appeared.

Credit : Tech Insider

Ever since the appearance of the first world maps, many people had noticed how well Brazil fits snugly under the belly of Africa. Alfred Wegener (1 November 1880 – November 1930) looked for other connections. He found research on identical fossils on the coasts of Africa and South America, something for which geologists, convinced that the world map was immutable, had offered a more implausible explanation: land bridges that had vanished after permitting animals and plants to travel from one continent to another.

Pangea, the supercontinent

But no matter how many bridges were dreamt up, the most renowned geologists were unable to explain why in Africa there are marking of glaciers or why near the North Pole there are remains of tropical vegetation in the form of coal. For Wegener this was only possible if the current continents were once concentrated around the equator forming a supercontinent, which broke apart some 200 million years ago and which he called Pangaea. Nobody had thought of relating all these facts, but Wegener saw in them the evidence of continental drift, thanks to his interest in different sciences.

With his multidisciplinary calling, Wegener had started out as an astronomer, being correct when he stated that craters on the Moon are the work of meteorites and not of volcanoes; later, he combined meteorological studies in Greenland with his geological theories, and did not have a steady job until after the age of 40, when an Austrian University created a post for him. He was a difficult scientist to pigeonhole. And for geologists he was an outsider who dared to question the foundations of their science, so most of them rejected his ideas with the backing of figures like Einstein, who wrote the prologue to a book that ridiculed Wegener.

A puzzle of tectonic plates

It is also true that he made some blunders, calculating that Greenland was approaching North America at a rate of 1.6 km each year, and saying that the continents were moving over the seabed but without explaining why. That was like saying that a plough can move on its own and leave no furrows. Tests were done, but with the most reliable instruments of the time no movement of the continents was detected. The 1964 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica still did not believe Wegener, but that year many geologists began siding with him, in view of new evidence. The idea took hold that the Earth’s crust is a jigsaw puzzle of plates, which move as whole pieces and not just the highest parts, the continents. This new theory— plate tectonics —also explained that earthquakes and tsunamis occur when two plates rub against one another, and that when they collide head-on, large mountain ranges are formed.

In addition, thanks to geolocation satellites, we are now able to detect that Europe and North America are moving apart, although at the same speed that a fingernail grows: two metres in a lifetime. Today we have all learned at school—or even before, in cartoons—the theory of continental drift. But Wegener died in 1930, long before his success was recognised. During an expedition in Greenland, he left the camp for supplies and was found frozen months later. He was buried there and is still there, although he is now about two metres further away from his birthplace in Berlin.

Francisco Doménech @fucolin

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Alfred wegener: how the awi got its name.

50 years was the age Alfred Wegener reached when he died on his third expedition to Greenland. The Alfred Wegener Institute (AWI) is named after the noted German polar researcher and geophysicist.

Wegener, who was born on November 1, 1880, became well-known around the world owing to his theory that the continents and oceans developed due to continental drift. While his theory is fundamental to today’s understanding of plate tectonics it was largely rejected by other scientists during his lifetime. Although he first publicized his theory in 1912 that there was originally just one large continent, it was long after his death that other experts started to concur.

The first and second Greenland expeditions

Six years before that, Wegener, who had studied Physics, Meteorology and Astronomy, had already embarked on his first expedition to Greenland, which lasted from 1906 to 1908. There, under the Danish expedition leader Ludvig Mylius-Erichsen, he conducted meteorological studies using kites and tethered balloons up to a height of 3000 metres to collect new data on the Arctic climate and weather trends. The research results had a strong influence on his work in the following years. It was on this voyage that he met Johann Peter Koch, a glaciologist, who led the second expedition to the Arctic, in 1912, in which Wegener participated. Together with two others they were the first explorers to spend the winter on the inland ice in that part of the Arctic, before crossing Greenland from east to west. Wegener’s second expedition was also dedicated to scientific research. He collected a great deal of data on the glaciers and climate of northeast Greenland. These observations and measurements were later included in numerous works which Wegener published in the course of his life.

Wegener’s scientific work

Alfred Wegener’s major work “ Die Entstehung der Kontinente und Ozeane ” (“The Origin of Continents and Oceans”) was published in 1915. In it, he described how great forces pulled the continents apart over the course of the earth’s history, creating the continents that we know today. Up to that time, a majority of scientists assumed that the continents were immobile. Wegener was already theorizing then that the original single landmass was subject to various physical forces which caused it to drift apart. Despite the plausible explanations, his theory of continental drift was largely dismissed.

Final journey to the eternal ice

Wegener, however, was not put off by the scepticism about his theories, and continued to try to extend his knowledge. In 1930 he set out on his final expedition to Greenland. The aim was to gather continuous geophysical and meteorological data on the entire inland ice of Greenland with the help of measuring stations. To do this, he and his 20-strong team erected three permanent stations, one on either coast and one in the “ Eismitte ” (the middle of the inland ice).

However, the expedition suffered from numerous problems. The journey was delayed by the thickness of the ice; there was insufficient funding; and the propeller-driven snowmobiles were unable to deal with the fresh snow. In the end, Wegener decided to get to the “ Eismitte ” on his own with just two colleagues, Fritz Loewe and Rasmus Villumsen, in order to stock the station there with provisions. It was on Wegener's 50th birthday when he set off with Villumsen on the return journey to the station on the west coast – but neither of them made it. It was not until the following May that a search expedition found Wegener’s grave, which Villumsen had carefully marked. He is thought to have died around 16 November 1930. Villumsen was never found.

The Alfred Wegener Institute in Bremerhaven

Wegener’s unquenchable thirst for knowledge drove him to undertake several research voyages despite the very difficult conditions and to collect as much data as possible on the climate and weather in the Arctic. The scientists of the institute which is named after him pursue the same aim. The Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research was founded in 1980 and works in the coldest regions on Earth – the Arctic and the Antarctic – studying their role in the global climate system. The AWI is part of the Helmholtz Association of German Research Centres – Germany’s largest science organization, which pursues long-term research goals of society and the state.

The AWI employs more than 1000 staff at its headquarters in Bremerhaven in northern Germany and three offices in Potsdam, Sylt and Heligoland. In addition to carrying out research in the polar regions, the AWI’s scientists also work in the German coastal regions and the North Sea, to study the atmosphere, the climate and their worldwide impacts. Because polar and marine research also poses major logistical challenge, the AWI has excellent infrastructure, which it also makes available to both the German and international science communities. This includes several research vessels and aircraft, as well as research stations in the Arctic and Antarctic.

For the purpose of intensifying its research, the AWI participates in many international expeditions, among them the project “Multidisciplinary drifting Observatory for the Study of Arctic Climate“ (MOSAiC) which begins in the autumn of 2019. This will involve the research icebreaker POLARSTERN becoming deliberately trapped in the ice, so that it can drift across the polar cap. One of the aims of this expedition involving scientists from 17 different countries is to collect valuable data about the Arctic winter.

Alfred Wegener: Building a Case for Continental Drift

Born on November 1st, 1880 in Berlin, Germany, Alfred Wegener was the youngest of five children. His father, Richard Wegener, was a theologian who taught classical languages at Berlinisches Gymnasium zum Grauen Kloster—a prestigious school German school. Wegener first attended school at Köllnische Gymnasium in Berlin where he began to take interest in physical and Earth science and proceeded to graduate at the top of his class. After graduating he attended the University of Berlin as well as a university in Innsbruck, Austria. At the University of Berlin, in addition to studying physical and Earth science, he worked toward earning a Ph.D in astronomy. While working on his doctorate, he began to gain interest in physics, meteorology and paleoclimatology. Upon graduating the University of Berlin in 1905 with a Ph.D in astronomy, he decided to work at the Aeronautischen Observatorium Lindenberg with his older brother, Kurt, who shared similar interests in meteorology and polar climatology.

Wegener and his team preparing for a weather balloon launch.

Together the two brothers went on to use weather balloons as well as hot air balloons to pioneer meteorological research. The weather balloons sent into the upper atmosphere by them would execute metrological surveys and test a specific celestial navigation method using a special quadrant. On one of the hot air balloon trips, Alfred and Kurt managed to break the world record in 1906 for an uninterrupted flight—they remained afloat for around 52 hours. During his eventual four multiple Greenland expeditions, Alfred Wegener would use the weather balloons extensively to track various air masses and temperatures.

From 1906 to 1908, Wegener decided to take the first of four Greenland Expeditions in order to study polar weather. Led by Ludvig Mylius-Erichsen, the expedition crew’s mission was to explore the last unknown portion of the northeastern coast of Greenland. Alfred Wegener was thrilled by this opportunity as he always dreamed of adventuring into an Artic climate because of the scientific and physical challenges. While on the expedition, Wegener constructed the first meteorological station in Greenland. Moreover, he became the first scientist to use kites and tethered weather balloons to study the polar atmosphere.

Arriving home from his first expedition, he landed a teaching position at the University of Marburg in Germany thanks to his Artic research. There he lectured on various subjects including meteorology, applied astronomy, cosmic physics, and “astronomic-geographic position-fitting for explorers.” Students and colleagues of Wegener admired him for his clarity and ability to explain complex topics in simple terms without sacrificing detail. Hans Benndorf, a physics professor at Marburg, further applauded Wegener’s enthusiasm and clarity as he wrote,” With what ease he found his way through the most complicated work of the theoreticians, with what feeling for the important point! He would often, after a long pause for reflection, say ‘I believe such and such’ and most times he was right, as we would establish several days later after rigorous analysis.” In 1910 while still teaching at the University of Marburg, Wegener began to take interest in the history of the Earth’s continents and their placement, after he noticed the jigsaw puzzle like features of their respective continental shelves. More specifically he noticed how the eastern coast of South America and the northwestern coast of Africa seemed like a perfect fit, thereby coming to the conclusion that they must have been connected at one point. However, Alfred Wegener did not act upon this conclusion until coming across several scientific documents. Those documents he found, while browsing the University of Marburg’s library, listed information on fossils of identical plants and animals found on opposite sides of the Atlantic. Previously, explanations for identical fossils being found on separate continents were based upon the existence of a type of land bridge that has now been sunken. Nonetheless, Wegener knew his idea of the two land masses being connected was a much more viable explanation. In 1912, Wegener decided to present his idea of continental displacement, later known as continental drift, in a lecture at the Senckenberg-Museum and three articles in the Petermanns Geographischen Mitteilungen journal.

From 1912 to 1913 he began his second Greenland expedition. With the idea of continental drift fresh in his mind, Wegener was enthusiastic for another trip into the polar climate. The expedition’s purpose was reach the crossing of the inland ice of Greenland from east to west—an aim they had failed to reach in the first Greenland expedition. Unfortunately, the trip turned into a nightmare, to Wegener’s despair, as the expedition team ran out of food and became lost within the harsh glacial terrain. Luckily, the team was saved by a clergyman venturing back to a remote congregation.

Photograph taken of Alfred Wegener while on one of his Greenland expeditions.

Upon returning from the hazardous second Greenland expedition, Wegener married Else Köppen, the daughter of fellow meteorologist Wladimir Köppen, and resumed his teaching career at the University of Marburg. With World War I raging in 1914, Wegener was drafted into the German army, where he was injured twice and eventually declared unfit for combat. He was reassigned to Germany’s weather forecasting service for the duration of his service. In 1915, Wegener was able to publish the first version of his most prized work, Die Entstehung der Kontinente und Ozeane (The Origin of Continents and Oceans) as an extension to his previous lectures and publications from 1912. In this work, Wegener provided a considerable amount of evidence surrounding his idea of a “supercontinent.” Wegener believed his extensive research would sway the scientific community; however, his publication was mostly ignored and even generated hostile remarks. Three reasons the scientific community responded with such disdain to his theory were overall disbelief, anti-German bias caused by wartime friction, and most importantly the lack of a viable driving mechanism. Geologists and scientists alike couldn’t fathom the fact that such large land masses like continents could move, let alone “plow” through the firm oceanic crust. Additionally, Alfred Wegener being from German decent received less and even negative attention from the scientific community as a result of the tribulations and hostility caused by World War I. Most significantly, the adverse respond to his theory was provoked by his absence of a feasible driving force. Wegener provisionally suggested that centrifugal force caused by the rotation of the earth and even tidal waves could be possible mechanisms; however, it was well known even to Wegener that these forces were too weak and therefore inadequate. As a result, critics bombarded Wegener for suggesting a theory with no source to fuel it.

After his initial publication of The Origin of Continents and Oceans, Wegener left his position at the University of Marburg and moved to Hamburg where he became a meteorologist at the German Naval Observatory. In 1921, the University of Hamburg appointed him to senior lecturer. As a senior lecturer Wegener continued to improve his work on Continental Drift and was able to produce the third version of The Origin of Continents and Oceans in 1922. Sadly, the revised edition still had no influential mechanism and met much criticism both nationally and internationally. From 1924 to 1930 Wegener enjoyed a suitable position as professor of meteorology and geophysics at the University of Graz in Austria. During that period he coined the Greek word, Pangea, meaning “all lands” to depict his idea of the supercontinent that once held all the continents together. Additionally, Wegener ventured back to Greenland for a third time in 1929 and one last costly time in 1930.

Propeller-driven snowmobile used by Wegener and his team.

The third Greenland expedition was fueled by Wegener, who was restless from the unanswered questions of the failed first and second expeditions. This mini expedition under Wegener’s management mapped out a scheduled plan for a larger expedition later on and tested the efficiency of propeller-driven snowmobiles.

Wistfully, Alfred Wegener’s continuation into his fourth Greenland expedition proved to be fatal. On an ambitious move, Wegener planned to use a new seismic method to measure the thickness of Greenland’s icecap and establish a permanent station on the icecap in order to relay meteorological measurements years round. The expedition featured dangerously cold temperatures, leading to extreme food shortages and frostbite. Due to the food shortages, perilous trips between base camps needed to be made. On one of those trips Alfred Wegener never made it and passed away in November of 1930 possibly due to heart failure caused by over exhaustion. His body was later found the following summer and reburied at the site of his death

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4.1: Alfred Wegener and the Theory of Plate Tectonics

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If you look at a map of Earth, you may notice that some of the continents seem to fit together. An early reference to this phenomenon came from Francis Bacon in the 17th century, who noticed the similarities in the Atlantic coasts of Africa, and North and South America. This apparent fit is due to the fact the continents were once connected, and have since moved apart in what has been called continental drift . However, we now know that it is not just the continents that move, so a more correct term is plate tectonics . We can credit Alfred Wegener (Figure \(\PageIndex{1}\)) as the originator of this idea.

Alfred Wegener (1880-1930) earned a PhD in astronomy at the University of Berlin in 1904, but he had always been interested in geophysics and meteorology and spent most of his academic career working in meteorology. In 1911 he happened on a scientific publication that included a description of the existence of matching Permian-aged terrestrial fossils in various parts of South America, Africa, India, Antarctica, and Australia (Figure \(\PageIndex{2}\)). Wegener concluded that this distribution of fossils could only exist if these continents were joined together. Furthermore, some of these transcontinental areas have similar fossils until around 150 million years ago, then they begin to diverge, suggesting that the areas eventually separated and speciation took different paths on the separate continents. Wegener coined the term Pangaea (“all land”) for the supercontinent from which all of the present-day continents diverged.

Wegener pursued his theory with determination — combing the libraries, consulting with colleagues, and making observations — looking for evidence to support it. In addition to the fit of the continents and the fossil evidence, Wegener relied heavily on matching geological patterns across oceans, such as sedimentary strata in South America matching those in Africa (Figure \(\PageIndex{3}\)), North American coalfields matching those in Europe, and the mountains of Atlantic Canada matching those of northern Britain both in morphology and rock type.

Wegener also referred to the evidence for the Carboniferous and Permian (~300 Ma) Karoo Glaciation in South America, Africa, India, Antarctica, and Australia (Figure \(\PageIndex{4}\)). These areas contain evidence of past glacial deposits, including glacial scars oriented away from the poles, despite the fact that some of these locations are now tropical environments. This indicates that these continents were once closer to the south pole where the glaciers could have formed. Wegener argued that this could only have happened if these continents were once all connected as a single supercontinent. He also cited evidence (based on his own astronomical observations) that showed that the continents were moving with respect to each other, and determined a separation rate between Greenland and Scandinavia of 11 m per year, although he admitted that the measurements were not accurate. In fact they weren’t even close — the separation rate is actually about 2.5 cm per year!

Wegener first published his ideas in 1912 in a short book called Die Entstehung der Kontinente ( The Origin of Continents ), and then in 1915 in Die Entstehung der Kontinente und Ozeane ( The Origin of Continents and Oceans ). He revised this book several times up to 1929, and it was translated into French, English, Spanish, and Russian. However, despite his range of evidence, the continental fits were not perfect and the geological match-ups were not always consistent (while the continental fit left some gaps when using the current coastline, it was demonstrated in the 1960s that using a 500 m depth contour gives a much tighter fit). But the most serious problem of all was that Wegener could not conceive of a good mechanism for moving the continents around. Wegener proposed that the continents were like icebergs floating on heavier crust, but the only forces that he could invoke to propel continents around were poleflucht , the effect of Earth’s rotation pushing objects toward the equator, and the lunar and solar tidal forces, which tend to push objects toward the west. It was quickly shown that these forces were far too weak to move continents, and without any reasonable mechanism to make it work, Wegener’s theory was quickly dismissed by most geologists of the day. Alfred Wegener died in Greenland in 1930 while carrying out studies related to glaciation and climate. At the time of his death, his ideas were tentatively accepted by only a small minority of geologists, and soundly rejected by most. However, within a few decades that was all to change.

Additional links for more information:

• For more about Wegener and the other pioneers of plate tectonics, visit The Geological Society’s Plate Tectonics site: https://www.geolsoc.org.uk/Plate-Tectonics/Chap1-Pioneers-of-Plate-Tectonics

*”Physical Geology” by Steven Earle used under a CC-BY 4.0 international license. Download this book for free at http://open.bccampus.ca

Benchmarks: September 21, 1930: Alfred Wegener begins a fateful polar expedition

by Carolyn Gramling Tuesday, June 14, 2016

Members of the 1930 expedition, left to right: Johannes Georgi, Alfred Wegener, Fritz Loewe, Ernst Sorge. Credit: Archive of Alfred Wegener Institute.

Alfred Wegener (right) during the 1930 expedition and overwintering in Greenland. Credit: Archive of Alfred Wegener Institute.

In September 1930, 15 polar explorers set out from their base camp at Kamarujuk on the west coast of Greenland. The team was carrying much-needed supplies 400 kilometers inland to two meteorologists waiting at a satellite camp at Eismitte at the center of the Greenland icecap. The team, consisting of German meteorologists Alfred Wegener and Fritz Loewe as well as 13 Greenlanders, traveled slowly, their dogsleds hindered by storms and frigid temperatures. All but Wegener, Loewe and one Greenlander, Rasmus Villumsen, were forced to turn back by the blizzards. At last, the three explorers managed to reach the icecap camp at the end of October.

Loewe, they discovered on arrival, would have to stay at Eismitte through the winter: He was suffering from frostbite so severe his toes would have to be cut off. But the camp did not have enough supplies for all five men to last the winter, so in early November, Wegener and Rasmus headed back to the base camp on the coast.

They never made it.

Alfred Wegener, born in 1880 in Berlin, Germany, was a meteorologist and polar explorer, but is most famous as the author of the continental drift hypothesis, a controversial idea that became the basis for the groundbreaking theory of plate tectonics. Although he had formally studied astronomy, Wegener soon became more interested in the science of weather and studying the upper atmosphere. He was also a hot air balloonist, breaking a world endurance record in 1906 for the longest hot air balloon flight, at more than 52 hours.

His experience with hot air ballooning, and with using weather balloons to track air masses, earned him a place on his first polar expedition, a 1906 Danish-led trip to the northeast coast of Greenland, where he studied the polar atmosphere with weather balloons and kites. Wegener ultimately traveled to the Arctic on four expeditions: in 1906-1908, 1912-1913, 1929 and 1930. In 1912, Wegener was part of a four-man expedition to the northeast coast of Greenland. While the team was climbing a glacier, the glacier began to calve, and the four men barely survived. But his trip was scientifically successful; forced to overwinter on the icecap, he collected enough data on the meteorology and glaciology of Greenland to publish several volumes.

Alfred Wegener, during the winter of 1912-1913 in Greenland. Credit: Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin, Germany.

A map from the 1922 edition of Wegener's book "The Origin of Continents and Oceans." The map depicts continental drift during the Late Carboniferous, th Eocene and the Early Quaternary. Credit: "The Origin of Continents and Oceans," 3rd edition, Dover Publications.

Between his trips to the Arctic, Wegener was pursuing another field of interest. The curious coincidence of the matching coastlines of eastern South America and western Africa intrigued him. The prevailing wisdom at the time was that identical fossils found in Africa and South America could be explained by a now-submerged land bridge that once connected the two continents.

But Wegener had other ideas. In December 1910, he wrote a letter to his future wife, Else Koppe: “Doesn’t the east coast of South America fit exactly against the west coast of Africa, as if they had once been joined?” he wrote. “This is an idea I’ll have to pursue.”

He began to discuss his ideas at meetings, including a January 1912 meeting of the Geological Association in Frankfurt, Germany, and continued his investigation between polar explorations, turning to German geologist Hans Cloos for help in understanding the geology.

In 1915, in the middle of the first World War, Wegener published “The Origin of Continents and Oceans” in German. It went largely unnoticed. In 1922, a revised edition was published in multiple languages, including English, and suddenly, Wegener was at the center of one of the most important debates in the history of geology.

Wegener’s central hypothesis was that, rather than being linked across oceans by land bridges, the continents had instead fit together at one time like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, forming a giant supercontinent that he called Pangaea. Over time, the continents had drifted apart physically, the more buoyant continents floating like icebergs on a sea of basalt.

The relative buoyancy of continental rocks, in fact, was one line of evidence against the idea that a sunken land bridge had once connected Africa and South America. Wegener also listed now-familiar observations — the crumpling of mountain ranges and deep gashes in the seafloor — as representing the collisions or divisions of land masses. But the flaw in Wegener’s hypothesis — one that he acknowledged — was that he couldn’t come up with a convincing mechanism for the drifting. As a result, a majority of geologists at the time dismissed his ideas as “mere geopoetry.”

Photograph from the 1930 German expedition to Greenland. Credit: Archive of Alfred Wegener Institute.

Alfred Wegener (left) and Rasmus Villumsen (right) at Eismitte station on Nov. 2, 1930. This is the last photo taken of either man. Credit: Archive of Alfred Wegener Institute.

In 1930, Wegener and a team of 21 explorers embarked on what would be Wegener’s last expedition, to study polar air circulation over Greenland’s icecap. The team arrived at western Greenland in mid- April, but the harbor was iced in, and they were forced to wait until mid-June to disembark. More delays followed: One team set out in July to establish the first of three planned camps on the icecap, at Eismitte, but bad weather prevented the main party from sending additional supplies to the camp. Finally, in September, fearing that the Eismitte camp would not survive without these supplies, Wegener, Loewe and Villumsen embarked on their fateful journey.

When the team did not return that winter, the expedition members remaining at base camp assumed Wegener’s group had decided to overwinter on the icecap. But the following spring, with still no sign of Wegener or the others, a search party set out across the ice. On May 12, 1931, several hundred kilometers inland, the party came upon a strange sight: a pair of skis standing upright, a human marker in the vast icy wilderness. Digging deeper in the snow, they discovered the body of Alfred Wegener, sewn into two blankets like a sleeping bag and covered with fur coats (he may have died of heart failure through overexertion, although the cause of death was never determined). Villumsen, it was assumed, had buried Wegener and left the skis to mark the place. The team continued to search for Villumsen, finding traces of his passage for another few dozen kilometers — tent pegs in the snow, the remains of a dog camp — but he was never found.

Accounts by surviving members of the expedition, including Loewe and meteorologist Johannes Georgi, one of the two members of the Eismitte camp, described what they knew of these events. But questions lingered; Wegener’s widow appeared to blame Georgi for poor planning decisions related to the supply delivery that ultimately led to her husband’s death. Stung, Georgi wrote to the sponsors of the expedition, the Emergency Committee for German Research, asking them to look into the case — in particular, to answer the question of whether that fatal trip to Eismitte had in fact been unnecessary and the result of poor planning. The committee ultimately cleared Georgi, but he remained troubled by the experience for years.

Wegener, too, was ultimately vindicated, but only many years later. His hypothesis of continental drift remained controversial for decades, until, in the 1960s, new paleomagnetic evidence of seafloor spreading emerged — and became the basis for the theory of plate tectonics. 

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Alfred Wegener und die Kontinente

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• First Online: 13 September 2023

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Zusammenfassung

Alfred Wegener (1880–1930) wurde in Berlin geboren und ist bei einer Expedition auf dem Inlandeis von Grönland gestorben. Heute sieht man in ihm den weitblickenden Begründer der Theorie der Kontinentalverschiebung mit dem dazugehörigen Mechanismus der Plattentektonik, aber mit diesem mutigen Vorschlag einer dynamischen Erde ist Wegener zu seinen Lebzeiten kläglich gescheitert. Die erste Auflage seines heute berühmten Buches über Die Entstehung der Kontinente und Ozeane  ist 1915 – also in den Wirren des Ersten Weltkriegs – erschienen, wobei das Besondere an der Leistung des damals noch unbekannten Autors in dem Versuch bestand, die verschiedenen Disziplinen der Geologie, der Geographie und der Geophysik zu einer Erdwissenschaft zu verbinden.

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Heidelberg, Baden-Württemberg, Deutschland

Ernst Peter Fischer

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© 2023 Der/die Autor(en), exklusiv lizenziert an Springer-Verlag GmbH, DE, ein Teil von Springer Nature

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Fischer, E.P. (2023). Alfred Wegener und die Kontinente. In: Ein Scheiterhaufen der Wissenschaft . Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-67571-7_29

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DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-67571-7_29

Published : 13 September 2023

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