Eduard Suess

Eduard Suess ( born August 20, 1831 in London, † April 26, 1914 in Vienna ) was an Austrian geologist and politician of the 19th century and was known as an expert on the tectonic structure of the Alps. On his two main paleo - geographical discoveries are due: the former supercontinent Gondwana and the Tethys.

Life

Suess was born in London, the son of the Saxon Protestant businessman Adolph Suess and his wife Eleonore Zdekauer. When he reached the age of three, his family first moved to Prague, and 11 years later to Vienna. From a young age he was interested in geology, and published at the age of 19 years, as an assistant in the " Farm Museum " in Vienna, his first research paper on the geology of Carlsbad.

In 1856 he was appointed professor at the University of Vienna, first for palaeontology, geology since 1861. Besides his work as a university professor, he was also active as a politician in the Vienna City Council and as a Liberal MP in the Lower Austrian Landtag. In these roles, he operated primarily the Vienna Danube regulation and construction of the First Vienna Mountain Spring Pipeline. For this reason he also received at that time still mainly reserved for the nobles honorary citizen of Vienna. A bust at the fountain of the Vienna Schwarzenberg square recalls. In the years 1898 to 1911 he was president of the Academy of Sciences in Vienna.

Eduard Suess (today Marz ) buried in the year of his death in Márcfalva in Mattersburg.

His son Franz Eduard Suess (1867-1941) was also a geologist and professor at the Technical University in Prague and at the University of Vienna. His grandson Hans Eduard Suess (1909-1993) was a chemist and nuclear physicist and was a professor at the University of California at La Jolla.

Work

Since 1857, he gradually began his theses on the formation of the Alps to develop. In further development of the Geosynklinaltheorie of the North American James Dwight Dana, he came to the conclusion that the Alps mainly by slow side (lateral ) narrowing movements of the earth's crust, such as folding and thrust fault, in this case an asymmetric movement of the layers of rock in the north, were formed. As the driving force he took as Dana, the shrinkage of the earth's crust due to the cooling of the earth. Until now, the European geologists, most believed on the basis of James Hutton and Leopold von Buch, that the mountain ranges above lifting up by volcanic forces acting vertically from the ground. Suess held the volcanic activity but rather for a series of mountain building ( orogeny ), and not for his cause. The asymmetry of the mountain ranges he explained by the slippage of the rock layers on the sunken floodplain.

Suess was also involved in the construction of the Suez Canal and planned with Karl Junker 1873 Opened First Vienna Mountain Spring Pipeline, the Vienna since with drinking water from the Rax -Schneeberg supplied.

In the course of his career since 1878, Suess tried on a large-scale summary of the geological knowledge of his time, and he looked at the entire shape of the oceans and continents with its mountain ranges. Lyell's old " elevator tectonics " (slow rise and fall of land masses, with correspondingly slower erosion and flooding ) he held, since his employment with the complex tectonics of the Alps, is unsuitable. Instead, he tried, like Elie de Beaumont few decades earlier to link its tectonic model with the history of the Earth, as it had been handed around the world in the sedimentary rocks. However, he did so in a much more sophisticated way: to Suess took that the slump of an ocean basin would cause a worldwide drop in sea level ( regression). This leads then to an increased erosion of bare continents, these are again filled to increased entry of sediment into the oceans to this, and this, finally, to a renewed rise in sea level ( transgression ). With the introduction of the ( still used ) concept of eustatic sea-level changes it provided a plausible explanation of why different geological units, such as law, chalk, etc., are ever trained in the world of similar shape and can be correlated with each other.

Unlike Dana Suess held the oceans so for relatively young and evolving structure, and not for ancient, primordial collapse basins that existed since the time of the first crust formation of the earth. Suess ' statement, " The collapse of the globe is, we are witnessing " became the core set of his geological worldview.

Because of such considerations Suess came to the conclusion that Africa and Europe were once closely connected and that the northern Alps had once been the reason of an ocean from which the Mediterranean represented only a remnant. Although large parts of this thesis will not be accepted today ( was partly because the theory of plate tectonics to Suess ' times not yet developed ), it was with this thesis as close to the facts that the discovery of the Tethys Ocean, he is credited, to which he gave this name in 1893.

Suess resulted in his discussion of the structure of Earth's interior derived from the main constituents of the abbreviations

• NiFe (nickel, iron) for the Earth's core,
• SiMa (silicon, magnesium) for the inner ( oceanic ) crust and
• SiAl (silicon, aluminum) for the outer ( continental ) crust

One.

Among his other important findings include the fact that a certain Farngattung Glossopteris fossils found in South America, Africa and India is ( Farngattung that this also occurs in Antarctic fossils, Suess could not know at this time). His explanation for this fact was that these three continents had once been a " supercontinent " united. This he called " Gondwana " ( meaning " Land of Gond " ) or " Gondwana Land". He disagreed with the then prevalent opinion, identical or closely related species had migrated over isthmuses as that of Panama, from one continent to another. He believed that the crust was sunk between these continents during the Tertiary, ie the land bridges have previously identified all continents. The fact that the land masses drifted apart, it was not yet known, but he realized first that the East African rift had to be incurred due to lateral extension movements that led to the depletion of the earth's crust and the formation of a grave breach.

The regional, used in the central Paratethys area chronostratigraphic stage of the Sarmatian ( Miocene, Neogene ) was published by him for the first time in 1866. Nikolaj Barbot de Marny had suggested this name appears in a letter to Eduard Suess; the letter itself is not preserved. In the work of 1866 Eduard Suess noted therefore explicitly the co-authorship of Barbot de Marny on the name Sarmatian ( ium ).

Effect

Suess 1883 published a summary of his ideas in the work, the face of the earth, which was for many years a valued textbook of geology. In this work led Suess, in addition to the terms lithosphere and hydrosphere, including the concept of a biosphere, which was later expanded by unorthodox thinkers, such as Pierre Teilhard de Chardin or the geochemist Vladimir Vernadsky on. The study of the ubiquitous role of living organisms on the geological development of the earth, and the complex interactions between self-regulating cycles, such as the cycle of rocks, the water cycle in the atmosphere and in the ocean, the food cycle, etc, ultimately led to such a controversial ideas as the Gaia theory.

In a later edition of his work from 1904 Suess also tried naturalistic explanations for the biblical Flood report to find: he held the tide for the tragic coincidence of a seismic event with a tropical storm at the southern end of the Persian Gulf and a tsunami survivors in sea-going could have boats washed up into the highlands in the north of present-day Iraq. The breaking up of the fountains of the great deep ( 1 Gen 7:11), he led back to the known phenomenon of sources in the alluvial great rivers that suddenly spew more water during an earthquake.

Suess ' ideas about the sinking of the earth's crust in new ocean basins and the possible linking of the different continents was received wide. It was also used by mystics such as Helena Blavatsky or private scholars and publicists like Ignatius Donnelly to explain eg a real core of the Atlantis legend and other hypothetical continents and continue auszudeuten.

1937 was the South African geologist Alexander Du Toit in Suess ' name Tethys and Gondwana to the circumstances in Alfred Wegener's continental drift theory. Du Toit name for the former supercontinent Laurasia to the north of the Tethys goes back to Suess ' name " Laurentia " for the area we now know as the Canadian Shield. The name Laurentia was transferred in 1977 from a group of authors to Alfred M. Ziegler on the geological continent of Laurentia. The data used by Wegener names SiMa and SiAl for oceanic and continental crust were also marked by Suess first.

Honors

For his contributions to the geology of Eduard Suess in 1896 awarded the Wollaston Medal of the Geological Society of London. According to him, the Suess Glacier was named in Victoria Land to the south of the Antarctic and the moon crater Suess. In 1914 in Vienna, Rudolf -Fuenfhaus ( 15th District ), the Eduard- Suess - alley named after him, further roads in Linz, St. Pölten, Marz and Hirschwang an der Rax. His birthplace at 4 Duncan Terrace, London N1 was provided by the Geological Society of London with a plaque.

Since 1880 he was a corresponding member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences.

The Eduard Suess Medal of the Austrian Geological Society is named in his honor.

Writings

• About the brachiopods of Kössener layers. 1854 digitized
• The bottom of the City of Vienna. 1862
• The formation of the Alps. 1875
• The face of the earth. 3 volumes, 1883-1909; From 1904 to 1924.
• Memories. 1916