Alfred Wegener (Alfred Wegener Institute/Archive of German Polar Research)
7
TNT
Rasmussen’s last great expedition resembled a cinematic finale to an age of exploration—the ultimate success before an encroaching era of technology arrived in the Arctic and the era of dog sledges and rugged adventurers faded away. But in truth, these seemingly distinct eras—exploration and science—had overlapped. Peter Freuchen’s career was a case in point. Before he lost his foot, before he lost his wife, and before he lost his job at the Thule trading station, Freuchen’s life had proceeded from a single momentous decision: In 1906, as a young college student in Copenhagen, he had dared to sign up with the Danmark expedition, the journey to the Arctic that required spending two long years on the isolated east coast of Greenland.1 It was still a few years before he would begin his adventures with Knud Rasmussen; in fact, the two men had not yet even met. Freuchen’s job on the trip, we might recall, entailed taking weather and temperature readings, a task that at one point forced him to live many miles from base camp, in a tiny hut with ice-encrusted walls where he was hounded night and day by wolves.
His official title on the Danmark journey was scientific assistant. And his supervisor was a young researcher from Germany named Alfred Wegener, who was designated the chief scientist of the expedition. There exists no record of the first conversations between these two men. Wegener’s Danish language skills were poor, which isolated him from the rest of the Danmark team for many months until he became fluent enough to converse. From Wegener’s journal entries and letters, though, it seems clear that he and Freuchen got along well—so well that their friendship remained intact many decades after their initial work together. Both men were affable, quick-witted, and technically adept. More crucially, as part of the Danmark group, the two shared an experience that could hardly be fathomed by anyone outside a tiny circle of explorers. The course of their lives was shaped by the fact that as young men they had lived through a Greenland journey so intellectually and spiritually powerful that each felt compelled to go back to the island again and again, for reasons of adventure and science, as long as they were able.
Wegener was twenty-six, seven years older than Freuchen, when he joined the Danmark group. Born into a highly cultured, middle-class household in Berlin, he’d spent much of his early life preparing for a career in academia, and by his early twenties he already seemed a stereotypical member of the scientific elite. Scholarly, athletic, charming—his fellow students and instructors would later remember how his penetrating blue eyes made an indelible impression on almost anyone he conversed with. Above all, friends and family would remember Wegener’s serenity. Even in the face of terrible circumstances and overwhelming workloads, he came off as quiet and unflappable.
At this point in his life there was little indication that he would be regarded as one of the most important thinkers of the early twentieth century. Wegener’s American biographer, Mott Greene, wrote of his subject that he had “that special form of perseverance that allows one to stay at exacting tasks for long periods of time, without succumbing to boredom or restlessness in a way that makes work impossible.”2 It was undoubtedly true—by habit the young professor worked constantly on his research, late into the night and through the weekend, oftentimes forgetting meals and family engagements; in his study, as he toiled through endless revisions and calculations, he puffed constantly on cigars or a long pipe stuffed full of tobacco. His dedication to work obscured a crucial aspect of his personality, however. He actually disliked being deskbound and had a recurrent craving for intense physical experiences—hiking, sailing, mountaineering—that led him to leave the city and test himself against nature. Indeed, by his early twenties, Wegener had moved on from the study of astronomy, his first interest, to physics and meteorology, in part because he had decided that “astronomy offers no opportunity for physical activity.”3 Meteorologists of Wegener’s era were often engaged in invigorating outdoor fieldwork—constantly sending up and retrieving balloons and kites to collect atmospheric data in difficult weather conditions. Such work allowed Wegener to merge his love of science with his love of the outdoors, while also allowing him to explore his fascination with technological innovations, such as new gauges, instruments, and devices that were becoming crucial in his field. The stratosphere, the layer of thinner air above the more turbulent troposphere (the place where storms raged and clouds sailed by), had only recently been discovered. It was Wegener’s good fortune that his career coincided with the start of what looked to be a golden age of atmospheric research, an era when the forces that created weather patterns could be deeply investigated and measured for the first time. It seemed possible, in fact, that better weather measurements would even make possible long-term weather predictions, which up to that point had proven difficult.
Wegener’s first job after college was at the Aeronautic Observatory in Lindenberg, near Berlin, where he sent unmanned balloons into the sky to collect data—seven days a week if the weather permitted it. In the parlance of the era, he worked as an aerologist with an occasional interest in working as an aeronaut—that is, someone who liked to pilot a balloon himself. In 1906, he and his brother Kurt participated in an international competition known as the Gordon Bennett Balloon Race. Taking off in a large, hydrogen-filled balloon from a point in central Germany, the brothers mistakenly left their winter coats, along with most of their food and water, on the ground. Cold, hungry, but otherwise exhilarated, they drifted for several days over Germany and Denmark at altitudes ranging from three hundred to eight thousand feet. By the end, the Wegeners had flown for fifty-two and a half hours, an apparent world record, and likely would have stayed aloft longer if they hadn’t become so worn down by fatigue and frigid temperatures. As Greene recounts, by the end of the flight they were slowly losing altitude and in such a weakened state “that when they tried to drop ballast, neither of them could push a sack over the rim of the balloon basket.”4 They landed softly and without a scratch, however. And two months later, Alfred left for the Danmark expedition to Greenland.
In his late teenage years, he had read of Fridtjof Nansen’s exploits on the ice sheet, and ever since Wegener had dreamed of going to the Arctic. When he finally arrived there, he found that his own mental and physical endurance, considerable by any standard, was severely challenged. Here in the field, far from the lecture halls and laboratories, he discovered a place of tremendous risk and isolation. On long, lonely walks along the ice at night, he was astonished by the lack of human presence and the stark ringing silence all around him. “Out here, there is work which is worthy of a man,” he wrote in his journal on Christmas Day, during the first year of that two-year trip. “Looking nature in the eye and testing one’s wit against its puzzles, this gives life an entirely new meaning.”5
Was he more an explorer than a scientist? The distinction—largely a contemporary one and often used to distinguish men of ego and obsession from men of research—is perhaps beside the point. Wegener was both. Many of his journal entries from the Danmark trip regard his stoic acceptance of an Arctic expedition’s daily discomforts—miserable weather, frostbite, dreadful food, the long polar night, the challenges in getting along with a small party of gruff men in trying isolation. He wrote about how to endure the Arctic chill and how to shoot encroaching polar bears. On a typical day, though, Wegener and Freuchen also made painstaking measurements—still consulted for the historical record today—with weather balloons and compiled voluminous records of air pressure, wind, and temperature. These observations sometimes included ruminations on the beauty of the northern lights and meditations on the techniques of dogsledding, which he worked hard to master and at first approached as a scientist rather than a sportsman. (“It is very interesting,” he noted after his first driving experience, “this incredible desire which animates them all to pull the sleds along.”6) But repeatedly in his journal he would write: “On future expeditions…” And he would then make lists of what kinds of foods or gear he might bring along if he returned to Greenland. Also, which colleagues would he enlist to help him? “A professional photographer should come along on the expedition,” he noted. “A professional cartographer is necessary as well. A meteorologist. A magnetician. An aeronaut for kite and balloon deployments…a geologist, a botanist.”7
It became something of an obsession of Wegener’s during the winter of 1906 and 1907 to think ahead to what he might do in Greenland next time.8 The impression that comes through his diaries is that he had discovered a region that had been explored but not yet examined by the tools of modern science. And the mysteries here—high above, in the atmosphere; and far below, within the depths of the ice sheet—seemed so complex as to necessitate more time, more men, more thought. By his return to Germany in 1908, he seemed resolved to make another visit as soon as possible.
Of course there was a question: Why go back? Three men perished during the Danmark expedition; during a long journey to the northern coast, they had become stranded and eventually died from starvation. So Wegener knew the dangers were real. Why, then, leave a comfortable life in Germany and a promising career as an academic? Why leave behind his fiancée, Else? Why spend another year or two in what he would later call “the great white wasteland, the most absolute and lifeless desert on earth”?9
Two decades before Wegener arrived in Greenland for the first time, Fridtjof Nansen had declared that he would not only be the first man to cross the ice sheet, he would also be the first to make a detailed examination of the “meteorological phenomena” of the island’s center. What Nansen meant was that he would take readings for temperature, wind, and precipitation in an icy region that no human being had ever visited.10 Such information might have seemed inconsequential. Yet polar explorers of Nansen’s era were routinely challenged, often by skeptical newspaper editors, about whether they would acquire on their travels knowledge of any real and practical value. In respect to researching the weather on and around the ice sheet, Nansen insisted on its worth: “Every single section of earth’s surface stands in intimate and reciprocal relation to its neighbors,” he wrote. And the inland ice cap—“so huge a tract of ice and snow”—must therefore have an as-yet-unmeasured influence on the surrounding climate.11 Nansen’s point about the ice sheet’s effect on global climate was prescient. He was likewise correct in his larger assertion, which was that to understand the natural systems of the earth one needed to appreciate the characteristics of its individual regions. The interior of Greenland was a significant part of “the planet on which we dwell,” Nansen remarked, and unless we came to know it, we could never truly understand our world.12 The heir to this idea—that earth’s ice, seas, and climate share a tangle of important and unexplored links, and that Greenland was a key to understanding a much larger complex system—was Wegener.
His first expedition there, as Wegener saw it, was merely a prelude to a long career of Arctic research. When he returned to Germany in 1908 after the Danmark trip, he resumed his teaching and academic work. He published a book that drew heavily on his atmospheric measurements in Greenland, and meanwhile began to develop a theory—a theory unrelated to his Arctic work—which proposed that all the earth’s great land masses were once clustered together (later described as a supercontinent known as Pangaea) only to move apart over billions of years. His idea on the origin of continents and oceans, which in time became known as the theory of continental drift, or continental displacement, was surprising not only in its assertions, but in who its author was: An atmospheric scientist with an abiding curiosity in Greenland who had little training in the geological sciences. And in fact, even as Wegener was writing his momentous paper on the continents, he was considering his next trip to the Arctic. The stated goal of the Danmark trip had been to chart unexplored parts of Greenland’s northern coast; the goal of the next expedition that Wegener was planning—what was eventually called the “Koch-Wegener” expedition, and which included Wegener’s colleague J. P. Koch from the Danmark, along with Vigfús Sigurðsson (from Iceland) and Lars Larsen (from Denmark)—was to return to the same east coast harbor where the Danmark had anchored. From there, the men would spend the winter on the ice sheet—the first group ever to do so. And in the spring they would make a long trek across the ice to the west coast, not unlike Nansen had done years before, where they would take a boat back to Europe.
This time Wegener was intent on making detailed studies of Greenland’s glaciers, upper atmosphere, geology, and northern lights. It would be a science expedition, pure and simple.
Wegener arrived on the island’s east coast in July 1912. He began to keep a diary, as did his colleague Koch, the official leader of the expedition. Together, their journals offer a meticulous, day-by-day account of their journey. What happened was this:
The men brought with them sixteen sturdy Icelandic horses, rather than dogs, to pull their sleds, believing from experience that the horses would do better at carting the men and their twenty tons of supplies up the steep icy inclines on the edges of the ice sheet. When their ship landed in Greenland, though, thirteen of the sixteen horses ran away. The men succeeded in recapturing ten of them. They now had thirteen horses left.
A few weeks later, while crossing a glacier, Wegener fell and broke a rib. He nearly blacked out from the pain. “I slipped on the smooth, new ice,” he scribbled in his journal that night, rigid and in agony in his tent. “I fell on my camera, which I had been carrying on my back, and it bored a hole in my back, just above my pelvic bone.”13 After allowing a few days for recuperation, the expedition kept moving, with Wegener bent over and hobbling in discomfort.
From the coast they tried to reach Queen Louise Land, a region located on the eastern side of the ice sheet, where they intended to set up camp for winter. To get there, they were forced to build a bridge over five deep crevasses and cut a passage through a glacier. In one account, the glacier suddenly calved, “and a block of ice a third of a mile wide fell into the fjord where the expedition had its horses and supplies.”14 Half of their supplies were destroyed, and four of their seven sledges were broken beyond repair. Abandoning the goal of Queen Louise Land, they set up winter camp in a small, prefabricated hut on the eastern edge of the ice sheet. There, they slaughtered several horses and fed the meat to the other horses. They now had five horses left.
J. P. Koch was out crossing a snow bridge not long after; when it collapsed he dropped forty feet into a narrow crevasse. As the team rushed back to camp to get a rope ladder, Wegener feared Koch might die. Koch did not. But in the fall he had broken his leg and lost at the bottom his theodolite, a crucial navigation instrument.15 “For three months,” Koch would recall, “I was confined to my bed and we could not proceed until March.”16 The temperature in camp hovered as low as –58 degrees Fahrenheit. In photographs from these months, a bearded Koch lies on his bunk, eyes closed, intently smoking a pipe and surrounded by books, his lower right leg swathed in bandages.
On April 20, 1913, they set out on a southwest course for the west coast—about seven hundred miles away. Winter was ending, but the weather proved worse than their worst expectations. Staggered by winds and blowing snow, the men often huddled in their tents, waiting for the blizzards to cease. Yet even on travel days they were desperate—walking sideways, walking backward—to avoid the scouring gales. The sun and wind and airborne ice crystals ravaged their skin. Wounds flowered on their cheeks and chins. Wegener noted the tip of his nose had frozen solid “at least 10 times” and that his face, resembling a leprosy victim’s, was missing patches of skin and covered with “ulcerous yellow spots.”17 Temperatures bounced between –22 degrees and –30 degrees Fahrenheit. The horses, now almost totally snowblind, plodded forward in numb exhaustion.
Slowly, Wegener was growing aware, too, of how in Greenland the desire to survive so thoroughly overwhelmed the desire to think. Stuck in his tent during a snowstorm on the ice sheet, he noted that
one would think 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 volcanoes, 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.
He wondered about the life he and his fiancée, Else, would begin next year in Germany. Also, he wondered about supper: “What kind of food will we cook?”18
The situation was becoming more desperate in late May. Realizing that several of the horses could walk no farther, the group agreed the sickest animals should be executed. That left three—Lady, Red, and Grauni. But Lady and Red, Wegener confided in his journal, were “half-dead,” and Lady collapsed soon after. “And we still don’t know if any of us will reach the west coast alive,” he wrote.19
They were now nearly halfway across the ice.
On June 11 one of the last two horses, Red, was put down. That left Grauni. The men rallied to the sorrowful cause of the faithful gray horse. This last horse, they decided, had to be saved. And so they fed Grauni portions of their own scarce food. They pulled Grauni on their own sleds to ease its suffering. When they spotted ice-free land several weeks later, on July 2, they realized they had reached the western edge of the ice sheet. A year before, they had arranged to have a depot of food left just a mile away. But that looked to be on the far side of crevasses and streams covered by fragile ice. It seemed treacherous enough for men to get there—but a heavy, sickly animal? “Therefore,” Koch would later say, “we were obliged to kill our last horse, our good friend in need.”20 More precisely, Wegener noted in his journal that several of the men made it to the depot and returned to camp with some bread for Grauni, only to find the horse lying on the ground, dying. “Our last bullet was used to end his suffering,” he wrote.21
In truth the four men were nearly dead as well. They had only four hunks of black bread, some condensed milk, and a small companion dog, Gloë, who Wegener had bought just before the trip. On July 13 the men reached a fjord on the west coast, and by their estimation they were now close to Proven, a small coastal settlement. But hiking along the coast involved going up and down steep terrain, and to compound their difficulties they hit rain, snow, and fog. To stay alert they sniffed drops of camphor, but eventually even this couldn’t subdue their exhaustion. Starving and soaked through—and now in a state of continuous nausea and dizziness—the four built a shelter out of rocks and moss, curled up inside, and rested for thirty-seven hours. “I was appalled,” Wegener would later recall of these thirty-seven hours. “After surviving such a long and dangerous journey, and less than 2 miles from the colony, we were to die here like animals? In July? Was there even a trace of logic to that? Everything inside me rebelled against this thought, and I concentrated all my mental strength on this: I want to live.”22
And so, acting on the notion that a final meal might give the men strength to continue, they agreed to slaughter Gloë, their small dog, and use the meat to make stew. As they divided the food and sat down to eat—at the very instant they sat down to eat—Wegener thought he saw through the fog a sailboat off the coast. He peered through a telescope to make sure he hadn’t mistaken an ice floe bobbing in the water for a boat. It was July 15. The men had been in Greenland for almost exactly one year. After signaling and yelling desperately to the ship, they watched it veer toward the shore. An hour later they were aboard, eating eggs and fresh bread, sipping coffee, and puffing on pipes, now stuffed with fresh tobacco given to them by an obliging crew. Their rescue could never make for a good novel or film; the timing, all true, was too perfect to believe.
Wegener would later consider the expedition a success. Somehow he could put aside the string of calamities—events that would leave most men to imagine they had been cursed by the gods—and conclude that he had not only completed a monumental crossing of the ice sheet but had pushed the cause of Arctic science forward. He wasn’t convinced he had yet discovered anything of deep significance. But he and his colleagues returned with a rich written and photographic record of their trip, some of it chronicling their science endeavors (studies of the northern lights, the ice sheet’s topography, and Greenland’s weather) and some of it chronicling the journey itself. Indeed, the record of the journey would later be featured in Koch’s published journal of the crossing, Through the White Desert, which captured the stark scenery of the ice sheet without quite conveying its unceasing misery.23 Also tucked into Koch’s journal was a photograph of a pit, comprising descending steps that extended to twenty-three feet in depth, which the men had dug into the ice as an experiment.
The pit was used to study the temperature of the central ice sheet. “This was hard work today, to dig 7 meters deep,” Koch wrote on June 12. “From 5 meters downwards the firn”—the name for deeper, older, more granular snow—“became so hard that a single powerful spade stroke went only half a decimeter deep.”24 But by measuring the snow temperature deep in the “big hole,” as Koch called it, the men were able to determine the temperatures from past years and could estimate that the annual average temperature of central Greenland was just below –30 degrees Celsius. What’s more, their pit revealed a layering of the ice sheet—how each year a winter’s snowfall had piled on top of one from the year before, which in turn had piled atop one from the year before that, so that each year’s snow had pressed down and added incrementally to the enormous bulk of ice they were crossing. Wegener didn’t remark on whether (or how) this might serve as a future point for inquiry. Still, he wrote in his journal, “We are pleased with the good results.”25
Koch’s journal of the crossing was published in 1919, six years after the men had returned to Europe. In the intervening time, Wegener had endured several busy and difficult years in Germany. After Greenland he had returned to university life in Marburg, Germany, and married Else, his fiancée; they soon had a daughter and would eventually have two more children together—all girls. In 1915, The Origin of Continents and Oceans, his book-length exposition of his theory of continental drift, was published, meeting with a response that ranged from enthusiasm to incredulity. But Wegener’s return also coincided with World War I, during which he served as a soldier and was shot twice—once in the arm and once in the neck. And then, in the postwar gloom of Germany’s defeat, as his country’s economy descended into a perilous free fall, Wegener found he could barely survive as a scientist. He worked as hard as ever, eking out a living on small stipends from teaching and modest paychecks for writing assignments. His family scavenged in a nearby forest for wood to heat their apartment. Wegener’s biographer Greene relates that just after the war ended, in 1918, Wegener, at thirty-eight years old, “was cold, exhausted and broke.”26
He had the good fortune, in 1919, to secure a research and teaching position with the German Marine Observatory in Hamburg. And while he still struggled financially in Hamburg—he and his extended family used large tracts of their yard, along with some nearby lots, to grow vegetables to feed themselves—what ultimately changed Wegener’s life was a growing appreciation for his atmospheric research and his theory of continental drift, along with an appointment in 1924 to a professorship at the University of Graz, in Austria. In Graz, Wegener was at last financially secure. Between teaching and research, he could afford weekend ski trips in the Alps with colleagues and summertime hiking tours with the children.
“We had almost settled down to a life of middle-class comfort,” his wife, Else, would later write. “It seemed as if this would go on indefinitely.”27
But he began thinking again about the Arctic. In 1928, one of Wegener’s former students, Johannes Georgi, wrote to say that he was planning to set up a scientific base in the center of Greenland’s ice sheet to launch aerial balloons and research the jet stream, which was barely understood at the time. Wegener seemed electrified by the idea, and it made him think back to his first expedition to Greenland in 1906. He wrote back to Georgi: “You mention also the question of a station on the inner ice cap. That is an old plan of Freuchen’s, Koch’s, and mine! If only the War had not happened, it would have been carried out long ago. But meanwhile Freuchen has lost a leg, Koch is in the hospital, and I too have had my own trouble and am no longer a young man.”28 This much was true—his old journeys to Greenland had occurred decades ago and seemed almost to have been part of another man’s life.29
He was now forty-eight. He smoked heavily, but still appeared healthy—barrel chested and athletic, standing a fit five feet ten inches. If he joined Georgi in Greenland, it would mean leaving his wife, daughters, and professorship for at least a year, maybe more. Should he? This would almost certainly be his last chance to go north again.
What pushed Wegener’s interest into a full-fledged commitment was a visit to Graz in the spring of 1928 by a scientist named Wilhelm Meinardus, who told Wegener of a new technique that a colleague of his had developed for measuring the depth of glaciers.30 After triggering an explosion with dynamite or TNT, Meinardus said, a researcher could rig a seismograph to gauge how long it took for an “earthquake” wave to travel from the ice surface, through to the bedrock, and then back again to the surface. In this manner, they could determine the thickness of the ice. Meinardus suggested Wegener try the technique in Greenland, and Wegener saw immediately that it might solve a difficult question: How deep was the ice sheet in its center? Within a few months, he formally proposed that Germany fund a massive Arctic expedition, led by him, that involved setting up not one but three scientific stations in Greenland—one each on the west and east coasts, and one on the ice sheet’s center. Some of Wegener’s goals were now glaciological: to measure the thickness and interior temperatures of the ice sheet, to determine whether the ice sheet was growing or shrinking, and to understand the flow and movement of glaciers. The other goals incorporated Georgi’s ideas to study weather and climate. The center of the ice had never before been observed during winter. Thus the researchers at the three stations, which would be built in a line along latitude 71° north (the Arctic Circle is at 66°33´), would make continuous meteorological observations for at least a year, so as to better understand the seasonal climate patterns surrounding—and influenced by—the ice sheet.31
As Wegener began planning the project, he also was corresponding with his old scientific assistant Peter Freuchen who was at that point working as a writer near Copenhagen. Twenty years had passed since the two men worked together in east Greenland. Wegener visited Freuchen, and he related his intent to create a station in the center of the ice. He also explained that his team of scientists would be large—ultimately, it would number twenty-two—and that he would no doubt bring a substantial amount of gear, food, and fuel.32 In effect, he was facing the same problem that every explorer of the ice sheet since Nansen had had to face. There would likely be sheer cliffs of ice to overcome on the west coast, which was Wegener’s preferred place for a base station, and almost certainly deadly crevasses. Wegener asked Freuchen: Where, Peter, would be the best place to climb onto the ice?
Time in Europe—time that advanced with the chimes from the central clock tower in Graz; time that progressed by the meeting of deadlines for scientific research papers; time that moved ahead in family dinner conversations and, afterward, in the agreeable curl of pipe smoke—was not like time in Greenland. On the coasts of Greenland, where quiet villages softened the stark landscapes, time moved more slowly, more strangely, marked by hunting seasons and cold spells and iced-in harbors rather than hours and days. Rasmussen and Freuchen understood this especially well. Calendars and clocks were of little use. Time in Greenland was indifferent to man, and often cruel toward him, and seemed deferential only to nature. And for that reason, on the occasion of a final opportunity to study Greenland, time became Wegener’s adversary.
In the spring of 1929, he sailed to the island to investigate the coastal geography and picked Kamarujuk Glacier, about halfway up the west coast, as the point where his expedition would begin its ascent onto the ice sheet the following year. He brought along three German scientists he had chosen as the main investigators of the expedition: Johannes Georgi, the former meteorology student; Ernst Sorge, a teacher with an expertise in glaciology; and Fritz Loewe, another meteorologist. Kamarujuk, they agreed, was fairly steep, but seemed superior to other entry points Wegener’s team had seen.33 The glacier was two and a half miles long—a smooth river of ice that flowed down a narrow valley from the central ice cap. At the top, where it joined the ice sheet, the altitude was about 3,280 feet above sea level; at the bottom, the glacier ended near sea level about a quarter of a mile from the coast, which was where a ship could unload supplies. “The main difficulty of the undertaking,” Else Wegener would later write, “would be the wearisome and lengthy job of transporting the scientific instruments, winter huts, fuel, and stores for man and beast up on to the ice-cap.” Indeed, the complexity of the task was exhausting even to contemplate. Kamarujuk was the ice road Wegener’s team would follow, lugging several thousand boxes and containers that weighed, all told, 240,000 pounds. Up the ice it would go—by horse-pulled sled, by dog-pulled sled, by rope and winch, by hand.34 Some of the supplies would be directed to the west coast research station near the top of the glacier, which was known as Scheideck; the rest would be carted about two hundred and fifty miles east, to the center of the ice sheet, to a station Wegener christened “mid-ice,” or Eismitte.35 An east coast station—the third leg of the expedition—would be supplied by a separate effort.
Wegener returned home to Germany to plan and pack during the fall and winter of 1929.36 In the spring of 1930, he set off again by ship for Greenland. Before he left, a journalist asked Wegener why he kept returning to the Arctic—now for the fourth time. He said, “It is one goal and one alone that pulls us into the frozen wastes: the joy of battling with the white death. Vast expanses of the earth are still closed to mankind by barriers of ice and snow. It is our mission to open these tracts and conquer the forces of nature, bending them to our will.”37 Johannes Georgi would later say that Wegener’s deeper nature was that of “a lion behind the lamb”—and indeed these remarks suggest a glimpse of swaggering bravado. But usually Wegener was a man of careful and thoughtful temperament. What’s more, just a few weeks later, when he arrived on the southwest coast of Greenland, it became obvious to him that nature was not bending, that nothing was being conquered, that willpower was almost irrelevant. What mattered was time.
The area where Wegener chose to ascend onto the ice sheet is situated in a landscape of islands and inlets and small peninsulas that, like most of the Greenland coast, was sealed tight during the cooler era of the 1930s with pack ice, which held fast to the coast from mid-winter until late spring. Wegener was hoping he could bring his ship to unload supplies at the foot of the Kamarujuk Glacier in mid-May. But the ice in the fjord remained frozen, and so he waited on the ship, many miles south of the unloading point, knowing that each day his chances of success—his chances of getting all the gear onto the ice sheet and building a central station—would diminish. The last weeks of May 1930 slid by. His team tried to break up the ice with explosives, without much success. And then June began. Even for researchers of today, blessed with a passel of modern technologies to ensure their safety, the science season in Greenland is short. Just as for Wegener, it tends to run from May through September, reflecting a keen awareness that weather and darkness make travel in the late fall difficult, and sometimes impossible. As Wegener waited for the ice to break up near Kamarujuk, his journal entries became edged with panic. “Our expedition’s program is slowly being seriously jeopardized by the obstinacy of the ice,” he wrote on June 9.38
At last the harbor ice broke up. Wegener finally landed his supplies on the rocky shore in front of Kamarujuk Glacier on June 16—thirty-eight days later than he’d planned. But his anxiety increased as the magnitude of the job ahead became clearer. Wegener hired teams of Greenlanders to help his men move gear up the glacier. Silent film footage taken during these weeks chronicles the abject misery of the work—lugging heavy boxes up the ice, by dogsled and horse team, slipping and sliding and hopping over small crevasses in the process. As the weeks progressed, transporting supplies became even more difficult: The ice began to melt, and creeks and gullies cut into the glacier and made climbing perilous. The men began to move the gear at night, when temperatures were cooler and the mosquitoes less ferocious. All the while, Wegener watched and worried. “I’m afraid, really afraid, that we’re not going to make it,” he wrote in his journal on August 5. “It seems that we are slowly moving towards an increasingly unpleasant predicament.”39
His biggest worry involved getting supplies to Eismitte, the camp in the center of the ice. The scientific validity of the entire expedition depended on building a functional station there before mid-September. Georgi had already gone ahead in mid-July to set up the station and begin his research program; two deliveries of supplies, made by dogsled teams, had followed. But the outfitting of the station had not been done with Wegener’s usual forethought, and a prefabricated hut, radio transmitter, and a full load of food and fuel had not yet been delivered.40 And now summer was almost over. “Providing supplies to Georgi’s station is getting harder and harder,” Wegener wrote on September 3. “If we are faced with autumn weather and strong winds from now on, everything will go even slower.” By September 6, he was inconsolable. “Disaster has struck. It won’t be possible to equip [Eismitte] in the way we had planned.”41
One of Wegener’s great hopes at the start of the trip was that technology would make this research expedition different, as well as easier. He had brought to Greenland two large, bright red, propeller-driven sleds—rather than snowmobiles, they resembled small fighter jets—that would carry men and cargo from the edge of the ice sheet to the central station. To Wegener, the machines would eliminate the difficulties of leading—and feeding—dogsled teams across the ice cap. All he would need were some cans of fuel. In his journal, he wrote optimistically, “I have the strong feeling that we are approaching a new era of polar exploration.”42 But it was turning out that the sleds didn’t work well in windy conditions or on steep terrain. Also, they struggled to move in deep snow. Peter Freuchen, on a writing assignment in Greenland, came to meet his old friend Wegener in early September. “With some difficulty I managed to climb the glacier with him,” Freuchen recalled of his time at Kamarujuk. The steep hill of ice, crisscrossed with crevasses, was difficult for the big Dane, who was hobbling with his wooden foot. Yet Freuchen succeeded in making it to Wegener’s western camp on the ice sheet and stayed for two days. Wegener showed him the motorized sleds. He even took Freuchen on a ride, and the latter seemed to think the machines signified a fantastic innovation. “With a speed of fifty miles an hour we zoomed across the ice,” he wrote of the sleds, “and in one hour we covered a greater distance than Knud [Rasmussen] and I were able to travel in one day.”43
Even so, by mid-September, after a demonstrated lack of reliability, the team had abandoned the idea of using the motor-sleds to get to Eismitte. And by that point, Wegener was weighing whether to make a final two-hundred-and-fifty-mile journey by dogsled to the central station. He was certain that Georgi and Ernst Sorge, both now living at Eismitte, needed more food and fuel; without another delivery they might not survive the winter.44 As leader of the expedition Wegener understood their fate rested on him. He deliberated for a few days, and by September 18 he decided to set out for Eismitte, accompanied by thirteen Greenlanders and the meteorologist Fritz Loewe.45
It was late, very late, in the season, he knew, perhaps too late. It was likely that no human had ever ventured so far onto the ice sheet at this time of year. On the morning of September 21, 1930, Wegener nevertheless left camp on the west coast with fifteen sledges and one hundred and thirty howling dogs. He was carrying four thousand pounds of supplies, heading east, into the wind that rushes down the ice sheet’s western slope. He was intent on saving his colleagues as well as his grand experiment, his caravan moving toward the center of Greenland, toward Georgi and Sorge, toward the island’s coldest place.