Cornelia Lüdecke

Scientific collaboration in Antarctica (1901–04): a challenge in times of political rivalry

When geographers recommended the exploration of the Antarctic regions at the close of the nineteenth century, Germany and Britain were eager to do their best. The promoters of Antarctic research, such as Georg von Neumayer (1826–1909) in Hamburg and Clements Markham (1830–1916) in London, could finally raise enough money to build national flagships for science. Despite unfavourable political circumstances, due to political rivalry between Germany and Great Britain, the leaders of the expeditions — Erich von Drygalski (1865–1949) and Robert Falcon Scott (1868–1912) — agreed to a scientific collaboration with regard to meteorological and magnetic measurements in Antarctica during 1901–1903, which later was extended until 1904. This paper reveals that favourable circumstances such as the International Geographical Congresses in London (1895) and Berlin (1899) played a major role in increasing scientific interest in and public support of Antarctic research, ultimately leading to international collaboration.

The International Polar Year 1882–1883

During the nineteenth century in the western world knowledge production was centred in North America and Europe including Russia, while Asia and Africa were not considered. Economical progress was accompanied by the establishment of national weather services and the development of systematic data collections. The Gottingen Magnetic Association (1836–1841) paved the way for international co-ordinated scientific work, when an international network of altogether 53 magnetic stations was established all over the world. On special days, called “term days”, readings of magnetic parameters should be made every 5 min at exactly the same time for the period of 24 hours. The British “Magnetic Crusade” to search for the magnetic pole of the southern hemisphere in the early 1840s was initiated in this context. Concerning maritime meteorology, a conference at Brussels in 1853 promoted the collection of meteorological data from ships, and the establishment of weather services all over the world was another remarkable milestone of scientific endeavour. The institutionalization of both disciplines – meteorology and oceanography – led to international arrangements concerning standard measurements and observing time. Traditionally, in all observatories investigations of the terrestrial magnetism were made together with meteorological measurements. “Although there is only a weak relation between both phenomena, one is used to considering them as related.”1

Legacies of the Jackson-Harmsworth expedition, 1894–1897

Frederick George Jackson, the leader of the Jackson-Harmsworth Expedition of 1894–1897, accomplished a great deal during his exploration of Franz Josef Land [Zemlya Frantsa-Iosifa] although his achievements have never been fully acknowledged. Jacksons expedition itself has often been eclipsed by his famous meeting in 1896 with Fridtjof Nansen, absent for 3 years in the Arctic and it has been unfairly coloured by the view that Jackson was no more than an adventurer and sportsman. The research reported in this article evaluates Jacksons plan and management activities. The study developed a set of factors to evaluate his performance arising from a variety of expeditions contemporary with Jacksons. His strong personality and limited personnel managerial experience limited the full extent of what he might have achieved. Yet, Jackson developed a strong exploration model that was based on comprehensive planning, a significant concern for the health and welfare of his companions, the willingness to innovate in a number of activities including sledging, and a commitment to scientific discovery. Although the expedition did not find a route to the North Pole, Jackson confirmed that Franz Josef Land was an archipelago and he gave credence to the consumption of fresh meat as a means of preventing scurvy. One of Jacksons legacies to subsequent explorers was the use of ponies for haulage. He was unable to appreciate the weaknesses in their use and his influence on subsequent Antarctic expeditions often led to undesirable results. But, overall, Jackson was an innovator in a conservative exploration community.

The Second International Polar Year 1932 – 1933

After the first International Polar Year, magnetism and polar research were institutionalised by the International Meteorological Committee (IMC) within the Commission for Terrestrial Magnetism and Atmospheric Electricity established in 1891.1 The Commission for Aeronautics followed in 1896 under the presidency of the leading aerologist Hugo Hergesell (1859–1938) to co-ordinate aerological ascents to investigate the meteorological conditions of the upper air on an international basis.2 At the end of the nineteenth century, aerological methods with registering instruments connected to kites and captured balloons to measure air pressure indicating the height, temperature and humidity had been well-established. By soundings of free-flying pilot balloons with two theodolites, wind speed and direction could be derived. The understanding of meteorological processes had made huge progress with the discovery of the stratosphere and the tropopause in 1902.3 During a Danish expedition to the east coast of Greenland 1906–1908, Alfred Wegener (1880–1930) successfully introduced aerology to polar regions4 (Fig. 6.1). Due to Hergesell’s initiative a German Geophysical Observatory was established on the west coast of Spitsbergen in 1911 in context with Graf Ferdinand von Zeppelin’s (1838–1917) plan to explore the High Arctic with his dirigibles.5

Investigation of the unknown: the flight programme of the German Schwabenland expedition 1938/39

When the third German Antarctic Expedition arrived at the Antarctic coast on 19 January 1939, an extensive flight programme of aerial photogrammetric survey was performed with the aim of producing a map of the discovered area, later called “Neu-Schwabenland”. The expedition was planned as summer campaign without a land-based station or airstrip. Instead two 10-ton Dornier Wal seaplanes were launched from the catapult ship Schwabenland. Information from printed travel accounts, results and unpublished private files of the expedition leader, Alfred Ritscher, give a detailed insight into the planning of the aerial survey at home, and its modification in the Antarctic due to weather and ice conditions; discoveries of high mountain ranges; as well as technical problems of the aircraft. An analysis of the events shows that the Schwabenland expedition 1938/39 can be seen as model for systematic use of aircraft for scientific investigations from the air.

International Cooperation in Antarctica 1901–1904

It took some years after the first International Polar Year (1882–1883) until magnetic measurements were coordinated in the Commission for Terrestrial Magnetism and Atmospheric Electricity, within the International Meteorological Committee from 1891. The investigation of the magnetic field of the earth became one of the most important goals of the leading nations, which invested a lot of money in the establishment of magnetic observatories at home and in their colonies.

International Meteorological and Magnetic Co-operations in Polar Regions

Hourly meteorological and magnetic measurements from 1 August 1882 until 1 September 1883 (13 months).

Some IPY-2 Histories

Already 44 countries had agreed upon their participation in IPY-2 when the International Polar Commission met in Innsbruck in 1931 for the second time. Although the world economic crisis took its toll, the execution of the Polar Year finally was decided. Austria’s economic situation was very tight, but it was agreed that the Commission’s invitation to join the international co-operation of scientific measurements of physics of the earth would be accepted. Relating to IPY-1, Austria should occupy a station on Jan Mayen once again. Norway offered free transportation on its annual supply ship to the Norwegian radio station on Jan Mayen, established in 1921.1

Lifting the veil: the circumstances that caused Alfred Wegener's death on the Greenland icecap, 1930

When the Geographical Society of Berlin officially welcomed Alfred Wegeners expedition back from Greenland in 1931, a memorial address was made in honour of the expedition leader who died on the Greenland icecap in 1930. This address included a report that shed light on the difficulties that had confronted the expediton. Wegener was remembered as a researcher who provided an example of ‘a magnificent conception of his duty as leader’ and who risked his life to rescue his comrades. Wegeners death was blamed on a chain of unfortunate accidents, especially bad weather conditions. Using material that was hidden in the archives, this paper examines several additional aspects of the story, such as the influence of the Notgemeinschaft der Deutschen Wissenschaft (Emergency Society for German Science), which financed the expedition; the erroneous judgements of the expedition leader as well as some expedition members; and the lack of radio transmission. The conclusion is that no single individual can be blamed for Wegeners death, despite the fact that one expedition member, Johannes Georgi, was made the scapegoat.

A German Contribution to South Atlantic Seabed Studies, 1938-39

The Third German Antarctic Expedition (1938–39) aboard the MV “Schwabenland” was one of the first three scientific expeditions to use echosounding to map the sea floor. Their echo-sounding data came mainly from the South Atlantic, where they (1) made the first discoveries of the submarine channels that form the heads of Antarctic submarine canyons, (2) made the first axis-parallel bathymetric profile down a mid-ocean ridge to display its rugged nature for the first time, (3) confirmed the probable existence of a median rift in the South Atlantic branch of the mid-ocean ridge, and (4) discovered that the floor of the South Polar Basin was more or less flat, a characteristic later recognized as typical of abyssal plains. The full significance of the echo-sounding profiles was not realized until much later – an example of the data from new technologies being ahead of the hypotheses necessary to explain them. The expedition’s geographer, Ernst Herrmann, an expert in volcanic studies, interpreted the mid-ocean ridge, apparently for the first time, as a volcanic construction. Subsequent studies show that the ridge is not build like a volcano with younger rocks atop older ones, but evolves laterally through sea-floor spreading in which younger rocks are fo cused along the ridge crest and older ones further away. Although Herrmann was right about its rocks being volcanic in origin, he got no credit for his imaginative proposal, largely because it was not widely read outside Ger many by those active in studies of mid-ocean ridges. In honour of the expedi tion, a South Atlantic seamount was named after the ship, and Antarctic submarine canyons were named after both the ship and the expedition leader, Captain Alfred Ritscher. In 2011 two further submarine canyons were named to commemorate expedition personnel, the Herrmann Canyon, after the leader of the echosounding team, and the Kraul Canyon, after the ship’s ice pilot, Captain Otto Kraul. Zusammenfassung: Die dritte Deutsche Antarktisexpedition (1938–39) an Bord des MS “Schwabenland” war eine der drei ersten Expeditionen, die mit einem Echolot den Meeresboden kartierte. Die meisten Echolotdaten der “Schwabenland” wurden im Südatlantik aufgenommen, wo die Expedition (1) die ersten submarinen Kanäle entdeckte, die den Anfang von antarktischen submarinen Canyons bilden, (2) das erste axenparallele bathymetrische Profil entlang eines mittelozeanischen Rückens aufnahm, um erstmals dessen zerklüftete Natur darzustellen, (3) die mögliche Existenz eines zentralen Grabenbruchs im südatlantischen Zweig des Mittelatlantischen Rückens bestätigte, und (4) entdeckte, dass der Boden des Südpolar-Beckens mehr oder weniger flach war, eine Charakteristik, die später als typisch für Tiefsee becken erkannt wurde. Die wahre Bedeutung der Echolotprofile wurde jedoch erst viel später erkannt. Dies ist ein Beispiel dafür, dass Daten, die mit einer neuen Messmethode gewonnen werden, den Hypothesen, die man für ihre Deutung braucht, weit voraus sein können. Der Expeditionsgeograph Ernst Herrmann, der zugleich ein Spezialist für Vulkanstudien war, interpre tierte offenbar als erster den Mittelatlantischen Rücken als vulkanische Bildung. Nachfolgende Studien zeigten, dass der Rücken zwar nicht wie ein Vulkan mit jüngerem Gestein über älterem Gestein aufgebaut ist, sondern sich durch die Spreizung des Meeresbodens mit jüngerem Gestein an den Seiten der Kammregion und dem älteren in größerer Entfernung davon ent wickelt hat. Obwohl Herrmann richtig lag mit seiner Deutung des Mittel atlantischen Rückens als einer vulkanischen Bildung, wird er nicht für seine anschauliche Deutung des Rückens als Linienvulkan geehrt. Das lag wohl hauptsächlich daran, dass seine Idee im Umfeld des Zweiten Weltkrieges außerhalb von Deutschland nicht bei denen bekannt geworden war, die sich mit dem Mittelatlantischen Rücken beschäftigen. Zur Ehrung der Expedition wurde später ein mittelatlantischer Tiefseeberg nach dem Expeditionsschiff und je ein submariner Canyon nach dem Schiff und dem Expediti onsleiter Alfred Ritscher benannt. Um weiterer Expeditionsmitglieder zu ge denken wurden 2011 zwei submarine Canyons nach Herrmann, der das Echo lotteam leitete, und Otto Kraul, dem Eislotsen des Expeditionsschiffs, be nannt. ____________ 1 Scott Polar Research Institute, Cambridge University, Lensfield Road, Cambridge, CB2 1ER, UK. 2 Fernpaßstraße 3, 81373 München, Germany. Manuscript received 14 Sept. 2012; accepted in revised form 28 February 2013. INTRODUCTION In the 1920’s Germany had become the leader in the new technique of scientific echo-sounding, which built on ad vances in the use of sonar developed in the First World War. The German research vessel “Meteor” was the world’s first to make scientific use of this technology, applying it on the Ger man Atlantic Expedition of 1925-1927 to the South Atlantic. The result was the first detailed topographic map of the South Atlantic (MAURER & STOCKS 1933), which was incorporated into the Atlantic bathymetric map of the time by STOCKS & WÜST 1935; Fig. 1). Echo-soundings were also collected from the South Atlantic, by the MV “Schwabenland”, en route to and from Antarctica as part of the third German Antarctic Ex pedition in 1938-39 (STOCKS 1939, HERRMANN 1941, RIT SCHER 1942, SCHUMACHER 1958). MV “Schwabenland” was equipped with two hull-mounted Atlas Werke echosounders to enable it to make soundings at close-spaced intervals while underway. The soundings were recorded manually, and taken as close as 5 minutes apart where the topography changed ra pidly. The process allowed a near continuous record of the shape of the seabed beneath the ship – a bathymetric profile – to be recorded along the ship’s track. Owing to the outbreak of war in 1939 the data were not fully published in fine detail and at large scale until 1958, as a German contribution to the results of the International Geophysical Year of 1957-1958 (SCHUMACHER 1958). The only other ship undertaking scientific echo-sounding in the South Atlantic at that time was the British research ship “Discovery II”, which did so south of Cape Town from 19331939 (HERDMAN 1948). Byrd had used a sonic depth sounder in the Antarctic in December 1928 (ROSE 2008), apparently more as a safety measure than to map the seabed. In due course the MV “Schwabenland’s” new and high-resolution data would help to improve the bathymetric maps of the South Atlantic. HEADS OF SUBMARINE CANYONS The ship’s main work area was along the coast of what the Norwegians called Dronning Maud Land and what the Ger man expedition named Neuschwabenland between longitudes 5° W and 16° E (HERRMANN 1941, RITSCHER 1939, 1942). Detailed echo-soundings collected close to the margin of the coastal ice shelf between 68° S and 70° 20’ S revealed a sea floor of broad ridges and valleys extending out to sea (Fig. 2). Recent multi-beam bathymetric surveys of the continental margin there by the RV “Polarstern” show that these valleys are the upper reaches of submarine canyons (Fig. 3, H.-W. Schencke, AWI_polar82.2_in_fin.indd 93 10.10.13 10:10 94 Fig. 1: Atlantic bathymetry, based on data from the “Meteor” and other expeditions, and showing the location of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge (STOCKS & WÜST 1935, Beilage 1); depths in metres. Note that although the map was produced in 1934, the final publication containing the map did not appear until 1935. The abyssal plain forms the floor to much of the South Polar Basin (Südpolar-Becken). Abb. 1: Atlantische Tiefenverhältnisse auf Grund von Daten der “Meteor” und anderer Expeditionen (STOCKS & WÜST 1935, Beilage 1). Sie zeigt den Verlauf des Mittelatlantischen Rückens; Tiefen in Meter. Obwohl die Karte 1934 erstellt wurde, kam die abschließende Publikation einschließlich der Karte erst 1935 heraus. Die Tiefseebecken bilden größtenteils den Boden des Südpolar-Beckens. AWI_polar82.2_in_fin.indd 94 10.10.13 10:10 95 pers. comm. 2010). The canyons were most likely carved by dense flows of turbid water laden with sediment derived from glaciers that dumped their loads onto the con tinental shelf when sea level was low during ice age ad vances, most recently 20,000 years ago at the Last Glacial Maximum (LÜDECKE & SUMMERHAYES 2012). Those flows ended up as turbidity currents that deposited their loads on the adjacent Weddell Abyssal Plain. As pointed out by LÜDECKE & SUMMERHAYES (2012), the MV “Schwabenland” was one of the first research vessels to recover an echo-sounding profile across an abyssal plain. Echo-sounding Profiles II and IIIa (Fig. 4a, b, and c) both cross the deep Atlantic-Indian-Antarctic Basin between Bouvetøya and the Maud Rise (Südpolar-Becken on Fig. 1), and showed that it had an almost flat bottom at a depth of around 5400 m. With the benefit of knowledge of the seabed that has arisen since those days, and knowing that this was the largest expanse of flat seabed on any of the MV “Schwabenland’s” profiles, it might seem surprising that the expedition’s geographer, Ernst Herrmann, did not offer some opinion about its origin, not least since he had been trained as a geolo gist. He began studying geology, mineralogy, geography and physics at the University of Berlin in 1917 and completed a PhD (Dr. phil.) at the Mineralogical-Petrographical Institute there in 1923 “On Twinning in Rock-Forming Plagioclase” (“Über Zwillingsverwachsung gesteinsbildender Plagiokla se”). After that he became an assistant (Volontärassistent) at the Institute, before eventually ending up as a geography teacher, science writer and science radio broadcaster. How ever, at the time of the expedition abyssal plains had not yet been recognized by the reigning experts (e.g. see SHEPHERD 1948). They were first noted on echo-sounders during Mau rice Ewing’s 1947 mid-Atlantic ridge expedition to the North Atlantic and during the 1948 Swedish deep-sea expedition to the Indian Ocean (HEEZEN & LAUGHTON 1963). Moreover, Herrmann’s geological interests tended to