1/18/2024 0 Comments Alfred wegener![]() ![]() Everyday life on the expedition: progression of events, difficulties, successes.Scientific questions: Methods, observations, measurements, the use of scientific instruments such as kites, balloons, and scientific photography.Today, these diaries allow us to reconstruct the course of an expedition from within. Wegener’s expedition diaries encompass the Danish Danmark Expedition (1906–1908), in which he participated at the age of 26 as an expert for aerology, the Danish North Greenland Expedition together with Johann Peter Koch (1912–1913), which aimed to explore the Greenland ice sheet, and the Wegener-led German Greenland Expedition (1930–1931). Danish North Greenland Expedition, 20 September 1912, DMA NL 001/009, 17. For a vagabond like me, there is no lack of small tasks, but when one has nothing else to do for the entire day, there is a time when the tent has been swept, petroleum has been poured onto the oven, a new light has been put up, all pipes have been filled and are hanging from the ceiling of the tent when the horses have been fed and the hay for their next meal has been weighed when one has read Koch’s diary: then, when one has nothing to do, one sits down and writes such a verbose, such a boring diary that no one will really want to read it. The only reading material I have is Koch’s diary, which he kindly gave to me for this purpose. Books and instruments are all packed into boxes, and I cannot access them. It is hard for me to find anything to do here in the tent. All these things that seem so unimportant, for example washing ourselves daily, overcoming an obstacle, irrelevant of what exactly it is-all these small things that make up daily life are things from which you can learn what “practical energy” is. ![]() While before, I did have a certain type of energy, which here, for the purpose of comparison, I must call “moral energy.” Here, I am learning practical energy, the energy of activity. For me, this expedition is surely very valuable. At the same time, I don’t believe that my diary is particularly enjoyable to read. It is a triumph that I have been successful in occupying myself on a practical level. ![]() If I report everything that I’ve done on a given day, it is a sort of justification. ![]() It is strange what unimportant things one includes in a diary here. Especially the crossing of Greenland and the establishment of a permanent research station in central parts of the Greenland ice sheet were difficult challenges at a time when new modes of motorized transport and flight began to be introduced in polar research. As a result, modern polar explorers like Wegener fell back on the traditional knowledge of the Inuit-including traveling by dog sled, wearing traditional Inuit clothes, building igloos, and hunting-in order to survive, work, and explore on the Greenland ice sheet over a longer period of time. Some of Wegener’s approaches, especially the exploration of the climatic and glaciological conditions as well as the use of seismological methodology to analyze the ice sheet, were continued after 1945.Ĭharacteristic for this type of exploration was the enormous physical and psychological exertion that extreme weather conditions demanded. For meteorological phenomena such as the low-pressure zone in the North Atlantic and Johannes Georgi’s discovery of the jet stream over Iceland in 1926–1927 made it clear that Greenland had a significant influence on the development of weather patterns. The exploration of Greenland during this period was also marked by the prospect of future transatlantic flights between North America and Europe. Aside from investigating unresolved geographic and cartographic questions with the intention of filling the last blank spots on Greenland’s map, Wegener’s work focused on gaining detailed knowledge about the origins of Greenland’s weather and climate conditions, the dynamics of its ice sheet, and the atmosphere above the Greenland ice sheet. Within this so-called “heroic phase” of polar exploration, Wegener embodied a new type of polar explorer in that he was mainly interested in basic geoscientific and meteorological questions and that he introduced new scientific methods and instruments in the field of polar science. 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.Īlfred Wegener embarked on four Greenland expeditions between 19, a time when the conquest of the North and South Pole began to enjoy enormous international public attention. ![]()
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