How many expeditions did alfred wegener

The resulting publications established him as one of the world's leading experts on polar meteorology and glaciology. According to fellow meteorologist and Greenland explorer Dr. Johannes Georgi, Wegener was the first to trace storm tracks over the ice cap.

When he returned to Marburg, Wegener resumed work on continental drift, marshaling all the scientific evidence he could find to support his theory. In , however, a third revised edition was translated into English, French, Russian, Spanish, and Swedish, pushing Wegener's theory of continental drift to the forefront of debate in the earth sciences.

EO Explorer. At the time of publication, it represented the best available science. Wegener was still an energetic, brilliant researcher when he died at the age of A year before his untimely death, the fourth revised edition of his classic book was published; in this edition, he had already made the significant observation that shallower oceans were geologically younger.

Had he not died in , Wegener doubtless would have pounced upon the new Atlantic bathymetric data just acquired by the German research vessel Meteor in the late s. These data showed the existence of a central valley along much of the crest of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. Given his fertile mind, Wegener just possibly might have recognized the shallow Mid-Atlantic Ridge as a geologically young feature resulting from thermal expansion, and the central valley as a rift valley resulting from stretching of the oceanic crust.

From stretched, young crust in the middle of the ocean to seafloor spreading and plate tectonics would have been short mental leaps for a big thinker like Wegener. This conjectural scenario by Dr. Peter R. Vogt U. Only later, in the context of the systematic exploration of the seafloor in the s, 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:.

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.

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.

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.

In he accepted an offer from the University of Graz Austria , where he spent fruitful years as an academic teacher and researcher. In the early s, academic life was still disrupted by the consequences of World War I. All in all, Wegener participated in four polar expeditions: the Danmark Expedition — , the glaciological Danish North Greenland Expedition with Johann Peter Koch , the pre-expedition , documented neither in the Deutsches Museum archives nor in this virtual exhibition, and the German Greenland Expedition — 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.

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.