Estados Financieros (B13)

Shortly after his return to Germany, Wegener began work on a textbook, Thermodynamik der Atmosphäre (Thermodynamics

of the Atmosphere). The book described how heat interacts with

Weather Pioneer  

Alfred and Else Wegener are seen here in their home in Marburg, soon after their marriage in 1913. Else was the daughter of Wegener’s mentor, climatology expert Wladimir Köppen. (Neuruppin Museum, August-Bebel Strasse 14-15, Neuruppin, Germany)

8  Alfred Wegener

other variables, such as air pressure and moisture, in the Earth’s atmosphere. Late in 1908 he sent a copy of his manuscript to Wladimir Köppen, an eminent meteorologist then working at the German naval observatory in Hamburg, for review. According to Johannes Georgi, Köppen at the time was considered the “grand old man of meteorology.”

Wegener had asked Köppen’s advice once before, just before his 1906 Greenland expedition, when Köppen had been head of the meteorological kite station at Grossborstel, near Hamburg. Their contact at that time had been brief, but after they consulted on Wegener’s thermodynamics textbook, Köppen became the younger man’s close friend and mentor. He also introduced Wegener to his daughter, Else, who was just 16 years old in 1908, when the two first met. Else was greatly struck by this handsome young man 12 years older than herself: “He was still tanned from the Arctic Sun and the

In 1909, Alfred Wegener became a Privatdozent at the University of Marburg, shown here. The university did not give him a salary; students who wanted him to teach them paid him directly. (Thomas Becker/Stockphoto)

sea air,” she recalled later in a book she wrote about Wegener. “His gray-blue eyes beamed light from his dark face.” Apparently the attraction was mutual: The two would marry five years later.

Meanwhile, the papers that Wegener wrote about his kite and balloon observations in Greenland led the University of Marburg to hire him in 1909 to teach meteorology and astronomy. He was not a full faculty member, but rather what was called a Privatdozent. This meant that the university did not pay him a salary; instead, he had to try to earn a living from fees given him by students and people who hired him to give lectures. According to university records cited by Martin Schwarzbach, Wegener taught classes in such subjects as the physics of the atmosphere, atmospheric optics, and “astronomic- geographic position-finding for explorers.”

Wegener’s students seem to have liked him. Johannes Georgi, who began studying under him in 1910 and went on to become a fellow Arctic explorer and close friend, described his teacher as “a man of medium height, slim and wiry, with a face more often serious than smiling, whose most notable features were the forehead and the stern mouth under a powerful, straight nose.” Georgi went on to say that Wegener “quickly won [his stu- dents’] hearts by the firm yet at the same time modest and reserved manner in which he immediately introduced them to the fundamentals” of meteorolo- gy. Wegener explained complex subjects in a clear and simple manner that students found easy to understand, Georgi recalled,

Weather Pioneer  9

A photograph of Alfred Wegener was taken in 1910, when he was about 30 years old. At that time he was teach- ing at Marburg and writing a textbook about the way heat interacts with other variables, such as air pressure and moisture, in the Earth’s atmosphere.

0  Alfred Wegener

yet he never talked down to them. He often enlivened his lectures with tales of his Greenland adventures.

Wegener’s thermodynamics textbook was published in 1911, and several well-known meteorologists praised it. Wladimir Köppen wrote that the book showed Wegener’s “special talent for explicating difficult problems simply and clearly with a minimum of mathemat- ics, and yet with no loss of precision.” Although Martin Schwarzbach points out that, at 30 years old, Wegener was young to be writing such a work, the text became very popular and went through sev- eral editions. Indeed, according to Roger McCoy’s Ending in Ice, a biography of Wegener that focuses on his Greenland expeditions, Wegener’s book became “the standard textbook for atmospheric physics in Germany” in the 1910s and 1920s.

✹wladimir köppen (1846–1940):

Pioneer Climatologist

Wladimir Peter Köppen was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, on September 25, 1846. His grandfather, a physician, had moved there from Germany in 1786 to work for the Russian government under the rule of Catherine II (Catherine the Great, 1729–96). His father was a well-known geographer, historian, and expert on ancient Russian cultures.

Like Alfred Wegener, his future son-in-law, Wladimir Köppen was unusual for his time in being an expert in several scientifi c fi elds. He studied botany, zoology, physics, and climatology at the Univer- sities of St. Petersburg, Heidelberg, and Leipzig. He obtained his Ph.D. in botany from the University of Heidelberg in 1870.

After working for several years in the Russian meteorological service, Köppen moved to Germany in 1875 and became chief of the new marine meteorology division of the German naval observa- tory in Hamburg. His fi rst job was to set up a weather forecasting service for northwestern Germany and the nearby seas. He left the marine meteorology offi ce after four years, but he continued to work for the naval observatory as a researcher until 1919, when he retired and Wegener replaced him.

Köppen applied all his scientifi c interests to his greatest achieve- ment, a system for classifying the world’s climates that is still used

in a modifi ed form. He recognized that climate determined what types of plants would grow in an area and that vegetation, in turn, could be used as a marker for climate. Relating vegetation patterns to measurements of rainfall and air temperature, he divided the world into fi ve climate zones: tropical humid, dry, temperate/mild midlatitude, continental/severe midlatitude, and polar. (University of Wisconsin geographer Glen Trewartha later added a sixth zone, the highland.) Köppen fi rst published his climate classifi cation scheme in 1884 but continued revising it for most of his life. The fi rst complete version appeared in 1918, and the fi nal version was published in 1936, when he was 90 years old.

Köppen also investigated Earth’s climates during past geologi- cal eras, a fi eld called paleoclimatology. This subject interested Alfred Wegener as well, and the two wrote a famous book about it,

Die Klimate der Geologischen Vorzeit (The Climates of the Geologi- cal Past), which was published in 1924. In addition, Köppen wrote

several volumes of a massive Handbuch der Klimatologie (Handbook

of Climatology), which he coauthored with his student Rudolf Geiger,

and several hundred scientifi c papers. This venerable and produc- tive scientist certainly lived up to his personal motto, “without haste and without rest.” He died in Graz, Austria, on June 22, 1940.