Georgi and Loewe under the ice (Alfred Wegener Institute/Archive of German Polar Research)
8
Digging
Eight weeks before Wegener began his journey to Eismitte, on July 30, 1930, Johannes Georgi had stepped off his sledge and ordered his dogs to halt. By Georgi’s estimation, he and his companions—a German scientist named Karl Weiken and four Greenlanders—had traveled two hundred and fifty miles over the ice cap and reached an altitude of 9,850 feet. Traveling from the west coast station, it had taken them fifteen days. In accordance with Wegener’s wishes, this was the place to set up the mid-ice science station. What the men actually did was dump a tremendous number of crates and packages haphazardly on the ice, along with piles of clothing, a pair of skis, and a tent. They helped Georgi set up a barometer and thermometer station. Then five of the expedition members turned and headed back to the west coast with their dogs. Georgi looked around—it was a splendid day, 18 degrees Fahrenheit, “bright and calm,” the blue sky streaked with cirrus clouds. The world stretched away from him in all directions to white vanishing points. He took off his clothes and washed himself in the snow. He wrote his wife a letter. He was alone in the center of the ice sheet.
He could soon see the weather here had wild swings—blowing and blizzardy one moment; sunny and still the next. Inside his tent the temperature seemed to shift from subzero cold at night to uncomfortable warmth, sometimes up to 50 degrees Fahrenheit on a sunny afternoon. Georgi therefore decided on his second day to begin digging out steps and a small room under the surface of the ice cap to house some of his weather instruments; his goal, he later explained, was “to protect them as far as possible from the sharp fluctuations of temperature.”1 He was digging into firn, the crusty snow that comprises the past few decades of accumulation on the ice sheet and has not yet compacted fully into ice. He used a shovel, a saw, and a long knife. And in the course of his digging Georgi decided not only to create a room beneath the ice, but a small round castle above it. “I cut the ice out in great blocks,” he would later recall, carried “them up the steps to the surface, and [used] them to build a wall as a protection against drifting snow, and, later, an observation tower.” Eismitte was initially planned as a cluster of huts and tents, but it soon began to appear from afar as a scaled-down medieval fortification.
Months before, Georgi had insisted to Wegener that he would be fine staying alone at Eismitte. Almost from the first day he was left behind there, though, he was beset by an ache of loneliness. His weather observations, done religiously three times a day, kept him somewhat busy. He was an obsessive photographer, so he also set about chronicling mundane jobs and documenting passing cloud formations. On many afternoons, he would put on skis and explore the perimeter of mid-ice for several hours. Sometimes he would do so wearing no clothing at all, save for ski boots. And all the while, there were meals to cook and eat: rye crackers with butter and sardines, or soups of pemmican, the dense cakes of dried beef and fat, that he mixed with canned vegetables. And yet his anxiety lingered. Each time Georgi would step out of his tent, he looked to the west, where black flags on tall stakes marked a track toward the coast, two hundred and fifty miles away. He was hoping to discern dots on the horizon moving toward him. The plan had been to have three more sledge teams visit Eismitte with supplies before winter began. Where were they?
On August 9, Georgi noted in his journal: “I often imagine to myself what the column of sledge[s] will look like in the distance.” A few days later, on August 11, he admitted: “I looked at least twenty times along the track to westward, down which my comrades must come.” On August 17, his third Sunday, he confided to his wife in his journal that he wished she were there, just to see his predicament. “I understand that my words give no real idea of it, nor even photographs,” he wrote. “The contrast between the boundless wastes all round and the tiny scrap of individuality cannot be reproduced. Tent, man, instruments—from three miles off not a trace of them can be seen.”2 A sledge party finally arrived the next day, five Greenlanders and Fritz Loewe, hauling eighteen hundred pounds of supplies. Georgi was ecstatic. But after dropping off the cargo, the party headed home twenty-four hours later, and he was alone again. He returned to his work—measuring temperature, air pressure, and wind, and sending up balloons to get a reading on conditions in the upper atmosphere. More meals were cooked and devoured. The sun was setting earlier in the day now, the weather turning colder. His prefabricated hut had not arrived from the west, and living in the tent was becoming unpleasantly cold. Meanwhile, he kept digging into the firn. His tower of ice blocks reached a height of nine feet.
He resumed his habit of looking constantly to the west.
A third sledge party arrived four weeks later, on September 13. Led by the glaciologist Ernst Sorge, the team brought three thousand pounds of provisions and fuel. “My solitary spell is over!”3 Georgi would later exult in his journal. What he meant was that when this sledge party returned for the west coast, Sorge stayed behind. The plan was for him to remain with Georgi for the winter, doing experiments on the ice and in the late spring or summer doing seismic work involving explosives to gauge the thickness of the ice sheet. As Sorge put it, “The snow-line was the line of demarcation” between the responsibilities of the two men. The meteorological work (“everything above” the snow) was investigated by Georgi; the glaciological work (“everything below”) belonged to Sorge.4
Sorge, thirty-one years old and recently married, was energetic and optimistic. Georgi, forty-one, was chatty and intense, and his angst seemed not to interfere, at least not yet, with his affability. The two men got along well—and both, as it happened, liked to dig. Within a few days of his arrival, Georgi noted that Sorge had begun “digging [another] large room in our subterranean world” to house the seismic equipment he would use to measure the thickness of the ice.5 When storms blew through the camp in late September, the men began spending time in this new underground cave as a sanctuary: It was warmer than their tent up above, they realized, and protected from the savage wind and snow. “My digging experience had shown that only six to nine feet down the ice was very firm and strong,” Georgi would later write. So he suggested they excavate “a fairly large space and erect our summer tent in it, far below the surface.”6 Eventually, the duo disposed of the idea of bringing the tent down. They simply sculpted bunks out of the firn, on which they laid their fur sleeping bags. With a ventilation hole and a judicious use of their stove, they discovered they could keep the temperature in the room between 23 and 32 degrees Fahrenheit.
On October 5, 1930, Sorge and Georgi officially moved in, six feet under the ice. Almost immediately they considered it an immense improvement in comfort over surface living. Eismitte, now a subglacial bunker, was entered by descending a set of steps next to the castle tower and passing through a door made from discarded sacks and furs. The strangeness of the new digs was not lost on the two scientists. Sorge would later write of the ice cavern that “our first and strongest impression was that we were lying in state in a crypt. Everything was white like marble, and our sleeping-places were clean-cut and rectangular like the marble base of a sarcophagus.” When daylight filtered down through the ceiling of ice, its colors were refracted so that it illuminated the room with a surreal blue glow.
The men now had time to ponder their dilemma. They had given up hope of getting a delivery of the prefabricated winter hut; and they had not yet received the wireless receiver they had brought to Greenland, so there was no way to contact the west coast station. Originally they had calculated they couldn’t possibly survive the winter without enough fuel—so they had sent a note back to Wegener when the third sledge party departed, on September 14, telling him that if they didn’t get a fourth and crucial delivery by October 20 they would set out for the west coast camp and return by foot.7 But then October 20 arrived. By that point Sorge and Georgi had been living in their under-ice cavern for two weeks, and the men had come to the conclusion they could likely manage their small supply of fuel through the coldest months, even as temperatures at Eismitte were now dropping on some days to –50 degrees Fahrenheit, accompanied by whipping winds. They doubted a fourth delivery would make it to them before winter. To make a 250-mile journey in this weather—to or from the west coast—seemed unthinkable. He and Sorge would therefore stay here.
For now, the men followed their scientific regimen and, during idle moments, forced themselves into a state of chilled hibernation. Three times a day, Georgi—or on Sundays, Sorge—would go above, clad in furs, to take in some fresh air and conduct weather readings. With the hours of daylight waning, this often meant working under moonlight and bright, starry skies, regardless of the temperature. On some evenings they stood under the glowing aurora borealis—the northern lights—and gaped in wonder. “We were gradually coming to understand Nansen’s enthusiasm for the Arctic night,” Sorge later recalled.8 When they weren’t working they wrapped themselves in reindeer sleeping bags down below, trying to conserve their energy as well as their meager fuel supply. They were in their ice cave on the afternoon of October 30, on their bunks and ensconced in reindeer fur, when Sorge heard the rasp of dogsleds and some muffled voices on the surface of the ice above. It was –60 degrees Fahrenheit outside. “They’re coming!” he shouted, both in shock and excitement—at which point both men leaped from their bunks and ran up the staircase carved from ice.
Wegener’s 250-mile journey from the west coast to Eismitte had begun on September 21 and was supposed to take sixteen days. It had taken forty. Soon after he arrived, he told Georgi “that it had been the worst journey in Greenland he had ever heard of.”9 He had begun with his colleague Fritz Loewe and thirteen Greenlanders, but as temperatures plummeted and conditions worsened, many of the Greenlanders, fearing they would never reach the center of the ice alive, turned back. At the ninety-four-mile mark the party was whittled down to three: Wegener, Loewe, and the Greenlander Rasmus Villumsen. The two Europeans were lucky to convince Villumsen to continue with them. Partly it was his experience as a dogsled driver. But also it was the fact that they could rely on the native Inuit people’s uncanny ability to see. Nearly a century after Wegener made this journey, scientists could still be astonished by the Inuit’s skill at identifying objects in their native landscape that are wholly invisible to outsiders—a polar bear clambering on distant sea ice, for instance, or a group of narwhals swimming miles out. Indeed, western researchers sometimes struggled to explain an acuity of perception that was almost superhuman.10 When Villumsen went ahead to lead the three-man team, Loewe was awestruck that he could pick out in the twilight black flags marking the route—“only a fraction of a square inch showing in a small snowdrift scarcely to be distinguished from any of the others.” Without his gift, they might never have made it.
The journey was not only difficult physically. It was difficult emotionally. Not long after he left the west coast, Wegener had received the note that Georgi and Sorge had written—it had been handed off to him, en route, by the third supply team, which crossed his path as it was returning from Eismitte. The note informed him that if the men didn’t get more supplies and fuel they would set out by foot for the west coast on October 20. Wegener believed such an act at this time of year was tantamount to suicide. And while the note had not prompted Wegener to make the journey to Eismitte, it had hardened his resolve not to turn back. “Whether Sorge and Georgi will be able to remain there or will come back with us remains to be seen,” he wrote during this journey in late September. “The whole business is a big catastrophe and there is no use in concealing the fact. It is now a matter of life and death.”11 As Wegener’s team had progressed along the route to Eismitte they kept a constant lookout for Georgi and Sorge, who they anticipated might be heading in their direction on foot. They never saw them, of course, because the men had never left Eismitte.
The fact that Wegener had endured such an awful journey so late in the season was something of a miracle. But there were other aspects of his arrival at Eismitte that made an impression on Georgi and Sorge. The first was that Wegener had exhausted his own food on the way and had been forced to dump all the other fuel and supplies he was transporting. Every morning, Wegener had made the same kind of calculations that Peary and Rasmussen and Freuchen had made years before in considering their odds against the ice sheet on any given day: Men and dogs and distance and food. What can be accomplished? In the end, the urgent journey to bring cargo to Sorge and Georgi had become a desperate race for his own survival.
What also struck Georgi and Sorge was that Wegener looked to be in robust good health. He seemed amazed by the subglacial cave the two scientists had carved out and paced excitedly around the strange alabaster chamber. “You are comfortable here!” he exclaimed over and over again. Descending into a room of calm air at 25 degrees Fahrenheit from a wind-buffeted world of –60 degrees Fahrenheit apparently made the new quarters feel almost tropical to him. And he seemed particularly enthused that the scientific viability of Eismitte could be maintained through the winter. Wegener spent hours talking with the men about their weather measurements and taking notes as they described the building of their underground station. The men meanwhile snacked constantly and sipped coffee. Finally, they slept: Four German scientists and a Greenlander, for two nights, crammed together into the ice cavern.
The most consequential aspect of Wegener’s arrival involved Fritz Loewe. Toward the end of the journey, Loewe had lost all feeling in his toes. Every evening and morning in the tent, in fact, Wegener had spent hours massaging the other man’s feet in an effort to restore the circulation. And to no avail. After arriving at Eismitte and conferring on how to proceed, the group agreed that it was too risky for Loewe to return to the west coast. He would remain here with Georgi and Sorge, while Villumsen and Wegener would return together by dogsled.12 The idea of all five staying at the station wasn’t seriously considered. There wasn’t enough food or fuel for everyone.
On the morning of November 1, it was time to go. Georgi took some photographs and film footage. Eighty-five years later, the images of that day convey a strange optimism, along with a striking poignancy: Wegener and Villumsen, clad in thick furs, shaking hands and getting ready to leave…Wegener putting on his thick gloves and waving…Wegener getting on his sled…and then Wegener cracking the sealskin whip as his dogs begin pulling.
Loewe was downstairs in the snow cavern; with his frozen toes, he was unable to walk. But Georgi and Sorge watched as their visitors departed and disappeared toward the west. If Wegener’s journey to Eismitte had obviously been made too late in the season, they understood the risks of his return journey were beyond reckoning. They could only take comfort in the fact that in traveling west, Wegener and Villumsen would be going downhill on the ice sheet and would likely have the wind at their backs. In addition, the temperatures had crept up a bit. On the day of their departure it was slightly overcast and –38 degrees Fahrenheit. “Splendid sledging weather,” Sorge would later recall. Also, it was Alfred Wegener’s fiftieth birthday. The men had celebrated the night before by each eating a frozen apple.
Several years later, Fritz Loewe would share a story about a conversation he had with Wegener during these strange and difficult weeks. On the sledge journey toward Eismitte, Loewe and Wegener had waited for a day at mile 204—meaning they were still forty-six miles from Eismitte. It was forty degrees below zero, and dusk was falling. The wind, which had been blowing steadily in their faces, quieted. The men pitched their tent and strolled around the vicinity, as was now their habit, to see if they might intercept Georgi and Sorge, walking westward home. “But nothing appeared,” Loewe would later recall. Wegener then took the discussion in an unusually candid direction: He “spoke openly (as he did but rarely) of his belief that there is purpose behind man’s evolution, and that mankind will ultimately be liberated by the growth of knowledge.” To contribute to the sum total of human understanding, he said to Loewe, was his ideal in life. Loewe accepted it as a kind of explanation. It was why they had taken this nearly impossible journey. It was why Eismitte existed at all.
At the time of Wegener and Loewe’s trek, much of Greenland’s geology and geography had been charted or was in the process of being studied. This was the dividend of the arduous expeditions conducted by Nansen, Peary, Rasmussen, Freuchen, and Wegener, who between 1888 and 1920 systematically explored remote coasts and glaciers, and who built upon research by the Danish scientist Hinrich Rink as well as a number of other Scandinavian and Swiss adventurers.13 In the early 1920s, moreover, the Danish geologist Lauge Koch, a former colleague of Rasmussen’s, spent several years on Greenland’s eastern and northern coasts, doing exhaustive geological and geographical studies. All this cartography was no mean feat. To look at a detailed modern map of Greenland is to confront its dizzying complexity—vast archipelagoes of islands that seem to splinter off from every mile of an epic coastline that itself is pierced by uncountable fjords, bays, and snaking inlets. “After two generations of incessant effort on the part of Danish explorers,” the New-York Tribune reported not long after Koch returned, “Greenland, the most northern country of the world, has been thoroughly explored, its mountains and waterways defined, and its contours mapped out.”14
This might have given Americans the impression that the far, frozen island was perfectly known. But that was hardly true. Greenland’s weather, for instance, created in part by the massive stretch of ice in the center, was barely understood. Georgi’s measurements of temperatures and winds—along with his balloon ascents when conditions permitted—were intended to help shed light on how these factors influenced the weather of Europe. The work was thought to have other practical applications, too. By the time Eismitte was established, the question of whether an airport or refueling station should be built in Greenland had become a matter of serious debate on both sides of the Atlantic. Aircraft were not yet dependable enough, in Wegener’s view, to use them to supply his expedition in 1930 (in fact, the first flight across the Greenland ice sheet didn’t occur until 1931). But as one polar historian noted, a realization had dawned around that time that “commercial aircraft, if they could be safely navigated across the Arctic…could greatly shorten the flying time between the great centers of population in the eastern and western hemispheres.”15 This possibility led other scientific expeditions besides Wegener’s to investigate Greenland’s aviation potential, including possible landing sites on the coasts.16
There were larger unknowns here, though. In 1930 the science of Greenland’s ice sheet remained mostly a mystery. How did it move and fracture and melt? What lay below? How deep was it, and how old? How did it build up, and how might it wear down? Some of these questions might eventually be answered by Sorge’s seismic work with explosives at Eismitte, which was scheduled for the late spring or summer. For now, the task for Sorge, the station’s glaciologist, was to dig a deep hole. Wegener had perceived the value of probing the ice sheet as far back as his 1913 Greenland expedition, when he and his colleagues had drilled into the ice with augurs, and in the midst of their crossing had dug the “big hole,” as J. P. Koch had described it. They had done so to measure the average temperature of the ice sheet and to view what glaciologists would eventually come to describe as the ice sheet’s stratigraphy—the layers of snowfall that build up and densify over time to create the bulk of its ice.
Sorge began to excavate what would eventually be called “the shaft”—his primary job that winter—in mid-October 1930. If you were to enter Eismitte at that time, you would go down the short flight of steps into the ice sheet behind the central castle tower and find yourself in a tight, tunnel-like passageway. To the immediate right was the small subglacial vault for Georgi’s barometer and meteorological equipment. If you took a few steps farther, you faced three doors. To the right was an entrance to the men’s living quarters, which included their bunks and kitchen; to the left was a storeroom for food, fuel, and equipment. Straight ahead, behind a wooden trapdoor, was the entrance to Sorge’s shaft. Seeing as they had no rope ladder, Sorge decided to construct it not as a hole but as a set of steps at an angle of 45 degrees. “Of course that means more work,” Georgi wrote in his journal at the time, “because it involves more moving of material. But, on the other hand, it is not dangerous, as we shall have proper steps to walk on and a shaft thus built can never fall in.”17 Sorge would dig blocks of the firn with a shovel and saw; then he would haul them up the stairs. By mid-January 1931, his staircase had reached twenty-seven feet deep; by early March, it was thirty-three feet deep. When Sorge reached thirty-six feet down he decided to stop building steps and continued the shaft as a perpendicular hole that he could access with handholds on the icy wall. The shaft ended at forty-eight feet, but another, smaller hole went down an additional four feet. In all, he reached fifty-two feet below the ice sheet surface.
The ice shaft terrified Georgi. He feared slipping on the steps and breaking a bone and being left incapacitated and abandoned at the pitch-dark bottom. He went there as rarely as possible. Sorge seemed untroubled by his daily descent, however; he worked assiduously, and daily, digging by pale lamplight and also taking readings from the fourteen thermometers he had inserted deep into the walls. He was especially meticulous in sawing out excavation blocks and carrying them up to the living quarters, where he could measure them. In particular, he wanted to see how the depth of the snow related to its density. Thus he would saw the blocks to a precise width, depth, and height, so as to calculate volume; then he would weigh them on a scale. Density equals mass divided by volume. The farther down one went, the denser the snow. That didn’t seem a surprise. But he also could measure significant differences—“perfectly regular fluctuations”—between the density of snow from each summer and winter, even if he couldn’t see any horizontal stripes on the ice block itself.
With this insight, Sorge calculated that in going down fifty-two feet, he had reached snow that fell on the ice sheet twenty-one years before. In essence, some of the deepest blocks he had cut were a record of temperature changes from snow that had fallen around the time that Wegener had crossed the ice sheet so long ago, back when he and J. P. Koch were urging their snow-blind ponies forward. And here it was, preserved in perpetuity.
With three men now living at Eismitte, life changed in significant ways. Georgi kept to his ritual of recording the weather data three times a day; Sorge remained committed to his afternoon ceremony, the descent into his deep shaft, where he would slice out ice blocks and gauge his thermometers. Georgi made a regular breakfast of oatmeal, and Sorge took care of afternoon dinners, which usually involved canned meat and vegetables but on rare celebratory occasions (a birthday, for instance) involved a slice of whale meat, simmered in water and butter, which had been sawed from a frozen, forty-pound hunk that Sorge had brought to the central station. On Sundays, each man got an apple or an orange that was frozen hard like a billiard ball. It was the culinary highlight of their week.
Sorge gave Fritz Loewe his own bunk and carved out another for himself. The men constantly debated whether the ceiling of their room at Eismitte—furred with hoarfrost now, and inching lower and lower as thousands of pounds of snow piled up on the surface above them—could collapse without warning. For safety, or at least for peace of mind, Georgi built a support column out of ice blocks in the middle of the room to hold up the roof.18 And then life continued as it had before: meals, measurements—and above all conversation, often conducted in the dim blue light to conserve fuel. The atmosphere was cold but warmly intellectual. The men passed around books to share (a favorite author was Thomas Mann) and on Sundays they discussed philosophy, “optimism and pessimism, religion, the growth of human consciousness, war and peace among the nations, and the probable changes in the world outside.”19 They also discussed Wegener and Villumsen, and how they might have fared after they left Eismitte to return home. Loewe, the newest guest, turned out to be a delight: affable, arch, polymathic. He spoke German, English, French, and Danish, and could read Italian, Norwegian, and Swedish; he would regale the men with stories about his experiences climbing in the Alps or of the daring airborne meteorological missions that he had flown over Iran. He had won the Iron Cross, first class—a high award for bravery—during the Great War.20 As Sorge and Georgi went about their science work on most days, Loewe, essentially an invalid, would stay in his bunk and help them by doing complex calculations in his head. Also, he would entertain them with witty, grandiloquent speeches that—he predicted—would be made in their honor after they returned to Europe. “In his opinion, ‘world fame awaits,’ ” Georgi noted skeptically in his journal.21
It was not clear to Georgi whether Loewe would even make it through the winter. The man was in agony. After his frozen toes had thawed, a necrosis began to spread through the tissue, darkening the skin and wafting the unbearable odor of gangrene into the cool air of the vault. All the men agreed the decaying flesh should be removed quickly. If they didn’t act, it seemed possible that Loewe would lose his feet, and might succumb to deadly blood poisoning. “We have nothing,” Georgi noted, “no book on frost-bite and its treatment, no surgical instruments, no bandages; all this—a whole chest of it—is lying somewhere on the road here.”22 But Georgi did have a pocket knife, which he sharpened “as thin and fine as possible.” He also had metal-cutting shears to snip the bones. On November 9, he stayed awake most of the night going over the surgery in his head. And on the morning of November 10, at eleven A.M., using a small amount of iodine and a mild antiseptic called chinosol, he cut off all the toes on Loewe’s right foot. Sorge held the leg down. Several days later Georgi cut off three toes on Loewe’s left foot. In the hours afterward, Georgi noted he had difficulty getting the smell of putrefaction out of his mind. Loewe’s feet healed slowly, and painfully, but in a few weeks, they showed a marked improvement. In a few months he could begin to hobble around.
Living inside the ice sheet from the fall of 1930 to the spring of 1931, the men often discussed the past. But increasingly they existed in a suspended state of the frozen present. Who was making the measurements today? What was on the menu for supper? How were Loewe’s toes faring? In a few years’ time, Sorge would continue his glaciological research in the Arctic and, later still, train Nazi soldiers in cold weather survival techniques.23 He would be dead by 1946. Loewe, the only Jewish scientist of the expedition, would flee Hitler’s Third Reich in 1934 for England with his wife and two young daughters, and then in 1937 move to Melbourne, Australia, where he would carve out a life as an esteemed meteorologist. He would forever walk with a shuffling gait and ride a bicycle everywhere he went. As an old man lecturing to students, he would recount at length the history of Greenland’s exploration—from Nansen, to Peary, to Rasmussen, and then to Wegener—and sometimes quote an entry from Wegener’s personal journal: “Nobody has accomplished anything great in life who did not start out with the resolve, ‘I will do it or die.’ ”24
Georgi would spend the rest of his long life dealing with the events that would unfold over the next few months.25
These futures were inconceivable. When the men thought of what might come next, they lay in their frozen bunks and focused mainly on any kind of marginal improvement for the near term. An extra piece of icy fruit during the week. The reappearance of the sun in the late winter. The relief mission from the west coast that was due to arrive in the spring. Outside Eismitte, the temperature fell to –83 degrees Fahrenheit at one point, leading Georgi to note: “We are here without doubt in the coldest place on earth inhabited by human beings.”26 Often, writing in his journal, he seemed convinced that the winter would never end.
In Europe and America, the Wegener expedition had been a front-page story almost from the moment it began. During the summer of 1930, newspapers chronicled the fateful delays owing to the late breakup of the sea ice in west Greenland. Later, they followed Wegener’s subsequent difficulties in getting his supplies up the glacier and onto the ice sheet. After that, readers could learn about the German team’s high hopes for the propeller-driven sleds, along with details of their plans to study the meteorology of the Arctic at three different Greenland science stations. When Wegener set off with his dog teams in late September to bring cargo to Eismitte—“Dr. Loewe and I are pressing forward to Dr. Georgi and Dr. Sorge at the central station and hope to reach them and be able to return to the coast before Winter sets in in earnest”—his cable about this new development was published around the world.27 But after that, anyone curious about the station in the middle of the ice sheet encountered silence or speculation. In late November, journalists and scientists began to ask whether the lateness of Wegener’s return was cause for worry. On November 26, 1930, the London Times noted “a feeling of anxiety.” For nearly two months, no one involved with the German expedition had heard anything of Wegener or the mid-ice station.28 And because a wireless radio had never been delivered to Eismitte, the blackout continued through the winter.
At the west coast station, it was understood that a rescue party would need to go to Eismitte as early in the spring as possible—by then, the central station would be in dire need of food and fuel. All along, the belief at the west coast station had been that Wegener, Loewe, and Villumsen had decided to stay the winter at Eismitte and that the five men had survived on the mid-ice camp’s meager supplies. “The longer we waited and considered all the possibilities,” Karl Weiken explained, “the more probable, nay the more certain, did it seem to us.”29 And so in February and March, a huge effort began in the west to outfit dog teams and amass enough dried fish for the dogs to eat during the journey. On April 23, seven sledges and eighty-one dogs set out for the middle ice. “We were so full of hope in those days,” Hugo Jülg, a schoolteacher who spent the winter at the western station, would later recall. 30 The propeller-driven sledges, beset with mechanical problems, had been abandoned on the road to Eismitte in the autumn—one was discovered twenty-five miles from the western edge of the ice sheet; another was thirty-two miles in. Now, the German mechanics dug the machines out and repaired them so that they could make the journey along with the dog sledge teams. In fact, the motor-sleds passed the dogs and arrived first at the central station, late in the day on May 7. The dog sledge teams arrived a few hours after.
Karl Weiken, who had come with one of the dog teams from the west station, would later recall “a sinister stillness” as he approached the camp.
He rushed up to a tent and shouted to anyone who might hear: “What’s the matter?”
He received no answer. Then finally Fritz Loewe came out of the tent limping, with a full beard.
“Wegener and Rasmus left for the west on the first of November,” Loewe told Weiken. “So they are dead.”31
In the hours that followed, men sat about the camp, dazed and grim. It was obvious to them now; they had spent the winter in blissful ignorance. The mid-ice team had not known the fate of Wegener and Villumsen. But neither had the west coast scientists.
The relief team had at last brought along the wireless transmitter, so the news of Wegener’s death was sent to Greenland’s west coast, and then to Europe, the following day at noon. The next task was to find out what happened to the leader and his companion. At mile 118—almost exactly halfway between Eismitte and the west coast station, at a place where Wegener’s skis had been placed upright in the snow—a search party led by Weiken and Sorge dug deep in the snow and found Wegener’s body. It had been carefully sewn up between two sleeping-bag covers by Villumsen. Wegener’s eyes were open, the men later noted, and the expression on his face was calm and peaceful. The search party seemed to concur that Wegener had died in his tent, probably of a heart attack from overexertion, and perhaps from skiing alongside Villumsen’s dogsled in –50 degree Fahrenheit weather for most of the day. Almost certainly his heavy smoking, and possibly a prior heart condition, had exacerbated his vulnerability.32 Villumsen had no doubt taken Wegener’s journals with him so he could deliver them to the west station. But what had happened to him? The search party located sites where he had camped after leaving Wegener behind, and then Sorge, accompanied by three Greenlanders, began searching a surrounding region of the ice sheet marked by long, undulating ridges and “the whole panorama of ten thousand snowdrifts.” The search continued for several days. Soon the ice appeared to Sorge like a hall of mirrors, where evidence of a campsite or a body was both everywhere and nowhere. He dug into snowdrifts and looked behind hummocks, believing he had noticed something. Then he would see it was illusory; there was no trace of Villumsen.
Sorge dispatched the Greenlanders back to the west coast station as their supplies ran low. But he continued searching, alone and obsessively, zigzagging with his dog team for eight more days over hundreds of miles. When he finally decided to give up, he did so by accepting the fact that neither Villumsen nor the journals would be found by him. The Greenlander may have died on the ice, Sorge surmised, in which case his body would be buried more and more deeply in snow with each passing storm. Or he may have reached the outer part of the ice cap “in which case his body under favorable conditions may eventually be revealed by the yearly melting of ice.”33
As the rest of the world followed the search in weekly news reports, eulogies for Wegener poured in from foreign leaders and from old Greenland hands such as Knud Rasmussen and Peter Freuchen. “To a polar traveler there is only one finger’s breadth between life and death. Without luck as a helping factor, nature is too strong,” Freuchen wrote in tribute to his old friend, at precisely the same time Sorge was searching the ice fields for Villumsen. It was important to see that Wegener’s scientific plans have succeeded, Freuchen added, “and he alone has failed.” How Wegener and Villumsen died, Freuchen correctly predicted, would never be completely understood.34 In addition, the journals that explained what might have happened were likely gone forever.
Else Wegener, Alfred’s widow, asked that her husband’s remains be buried in Greenland, and in keeping with her wishes a high iron cross, about twenty feet in height, was erected over the location on the ice sheet where his body was found. All involved knew that in several years’ time the grave and its marker would disappear. Snowdrifts would rise up and up; the pressure would meanwhile build so that the snow surrounding Wegener would turn to firn. And then the surrounding firn would in turn harden to ice. Ultimately, the scientist would be subsumed into the subject of his studies.
At Eismitte, work began anew for the summer. Loewe had departed. He had been transported to the west coast by motor-sledge so a physician could examine his injured feet as soon as possible. And while Sorge searched for bodies in the west, Georgi was again alone in the center of Greenland. He continued his weather and atmospheric balloon tests, and was forced to take up the record keeping in Sorge’s frightening ice shaft. High-strung by nature, the combined effect of loneliness and grief seemed to push him to the edge of a breakdown. “It is a long, long time to live here alone like this,” Georgi noted in his journal at the time. “It is a thing no one can really imagine.”35 Between factual entries on his daily activities he would sometimes pen raw disquisitions on suffering and compunction. “Never again on the inland ice,” he vowed to himself privately.
The cause of his anguish was clear to see. He knew that his note to Wegener—the note where he threatened to walk to the west coast if fuel were not delivered by October 20—must have been a factor in what had happened.36 “Wegener’s death affects me more deeply than that of any other human being would, you excepted,” he wrote to his wife at the time.37 But was that because of Wegener’s stature and the circumstances of the tragedy, or because it cast doubt on Georgi’s judgment and besmirched his reputation? In any event, Georgi was consumed by the fires of guilt. One day at Eismitte he came across a copy of Hamlet, frozen in a chunk of ice in a garbage bin at the bottom of the main staircase. It must have been Loewe’s, Georgi realized, and was dropped by mistake, perhaps when Loewe’s possessions were brought up during his departure. Good things to read were scarce here and prized. Georgi thawed the book, dried it leaf by leaf, and then began reading.
Sorge returned in late July. At that point, it was time to blow the explosives for the seismic tests. He set up a charge a mile and a half away from Eismitte, involving about 160 pounds of TNT, buried in deep snow. A film crew recorded for posterity the preparation and the massive detonation—snow and ice blown high in a huge explosion which Sorge was able to feel but not see, since at the time he was in a darkened room next to the living quarters in Eismitte, recording waves from the blast on photographic paper. The experiment struck him as successful. “I developed the film and found waves recorded [and] was practically certain [these] were waves reflected from the bottom of the ice,” he later noted. By looking at the time it took for the “reflected wave” to bounce off the bedrock under the ice and back to the surface, he calculated the depth of the ice sheet. His rough estimation was that the ice was between 8,200 and 8,850 feet thick. This led to his conclusion that Greenland, ringed by coastal mountains, was evidently lower in its center and resembled “a soup plate filled with ice.”38
In later years, Sorge’s estimation of the ice thickness would be seen as an imperfect measurement. It was the first of its kind, though, and allowed Kurt Wölcken, a seismologist and one of Sorge’s colleagues on the Wegener expedition, to make a general assessment about the extent and volume of Greenland’s ice. The island, Wölcken posited, “must carry a mass of ice amounting to a million cubic miles,” an area equal to all the mass of Europe, or about forty times all the water in the North and Baltic Seas combined. If the Greenland ice were to melt, he continued, “the oceans all over the world would rise more than 25 feet and extensive low-lying tracts of country all over the world would be submerged.”39
Wölcken had no sense of what the future held, of course. But he was correct in raising the specter of terrible floods and submergence. In time, scientists would conclude that his figure of twenty-five feet of sea level rise was inexact. But not wildly so. The German scientist had overestimated the oceanic impact of a world without Greenland’s ice by only about eight inches.40