Eduard Suess

Eduard Suess (Austrian German: [ˈeːdu.ard ˈsyːs]; 20 August 1831 – 26 April 1914) was an Austrian geologist and a specialist on the geography of the Alps. He is responsible for hypothesising two major former geographical features, the supercontinent Gondwana (proposed in 1861) and the Tethys Ocean. As a professor of geology at the University of Vienna, he was a founding figure in geology in Austria, influencing numerous geologists across Europe.

Eduard Suess
Eduard Suess, 1869
Born	(1831-08-20)20 August 1831 London, England
Died	26 April 1914(1914-04-26) (aged 82) Vienna, Austria
Resting place	Marz, Austria-Hungary 47°43′6.991″N 16°24′57.932″E
Alma mater	University of Vienna
Known for	Biosphere, Gondwana, Tethys Ocean, Das Antlitz der Erde, eustatic theory, sima, sial
Spouse	Hermine née Strauss
Children	5 sons, 1 daughter
Awards	Hayden Memorial Geological Award (1892) Wollaston Medal (1896) Copley Medal (1903)
Scientific career
Fields	Palaeogeography, tectonics
Doctoral students	Melchior Neumayr Johann August Georg Edmund Mojsisovics von Mojsvar Fuchs Wilhelm Heinrich Waagen Albrecht Penck

Biography

Eduard Suess was born on 20 August 1831 in London, England, the oldest son of Adolph Heinrich Suess,^[1] a Lutheran Saxon merchant,^[2] and mother Eleonore Friederike Zdekauer.^[3] Adolph Heinrich Suess was born on 11 March 1797 in Saxony and died on 24 May 1862 in Vienna, he had studied theology before moving to business;^[4] Eleonore Friederike Zdekauer was born in Prague, now part of the Czech Republic, which once belonged to the Holy Roman Empire and the Austrian Empire. The Zdekauers were a wealthy Jewish origin banking family in Prague who had converted to Lutheranism.

When Eduard Suess was an infant of three, his family relocated to Prague, and then to Vienna to manage a leather factory of an ailing uncle when he was 14. They had an English nurse and later a French and German instructor which made Eduard trilingual at a young age. He became interested in geology at a young age. He studied at the Vienna Polytechnic Institute and in 1848, during an uprising, he became part of the Academic Legion and stood guard in front a bank. Following the failed revolution, Suess' father sent off his son to Prague to avoid any possible repercussions. On a visit to the museum in Prague he saw Paleozoic fossils collected from the region. Some illness of the liver forced him to visit the Karlsbad spa region and he examined the geology and published a booklet on it in 1851 as an 18 year-old. He met the museum curator Maxmilián ‘Max’ Dormitzer and joined him on excursions. He also made contact with Joachim Barrande (1799-1883). His role in the revolution however led to a police summons and he spent a month in prison. He left studies at the polytechnic and joined as a salaried assistant in the Hofmineralienkabinett under Paul Maria Partsch (1791-1856). He also published his first paper—on the geology of Carlsbad (now Karlovy Vary in the Czech Republic). His first assignment was the reorganization of the brachiopod collection. By 1855 he had published 10 papers in paleontology. He also made a trip into the alps as an assistant to Franz von Hauer (1822-1899) in the Alps and collected fossils. He also noticed identical deformations in sedimentary and igneous rocks that did not fit with contemporary views on the formation of the Alps. He would later, eight years later, take two of his favorite students, Ferdinand Stoliczka (1838-1874) and Edmund Mojsisovics Edler von Mojsvar (1839-1907) to the same site and publish on the topic. In 1854 he visited Peter Merian (1795-1883), Bernhard Studer (1794-1887) and Arnold Escher von der Linth (1807-1872) in Switzerland. Escher showed Suess the "Glarus noose" on the way back. He visited Paris, meeting Gérard Paul Deshayes (1795-1875) and Élie de Beaumont (1798-1874) and then Albert Oppel (1831-1865) in Germany. Oppel showed him Jurassic material from near Stuttgart.^[5]

In 1855, Suess married Hermine Strauss (1835-1898), the daughter of a prominent physician from Prague and also a niece of Moritz Hörnes. Their marriage produced five sons and one daughter.^[2]

Hörnes became the director of the Hofmineralienkabinett after the death of Partsch in 1856 and with letters from him and others, Suess applied for a Privatdozent position at the University of Vienna which was dismissed as he did not have a doctorate, and worse, not even a university degree. He wrote a letter to the minister Count Leo of Thun and Hohenstein (1811-1888) who examined the position and said that he was indeed unqualified to be a privatdozent but that he could be made a professor. So, in 1856, he was appointed as an unsalaried professor of paleontology at the University of Vienna, and in 1861 was appointed professor of geology.^[6] He made use of the material in the mineral cabinet as well as excursions for his teachings. He gradually developed views on the connection between Africa and Europe. Eventually, he concluded that the Alps to the north were once at the bottom of an ocean, of which the Mediterranean was a remnant. Suess was not correct in his analysis, which was predicated upon the notion of "contractionism"—the idea that the Earth is cooling down and, therefore, contracting. Nevertheless, he is credited with postulating the earlier existence of the Tethys Ocean, which he named in 1893.^[7] He claimed in 1885 that land bridges had connected South America, Africa, India, Australia, and Antarctica, creating a supercontinent which he named Gondwanaland.^[8]

Suess published a comprehensive synthesis of his ideas between 1885 and 1901 titled Das Antlitz der Erde (The Face of the Earth), which was a popular textbook for many years. In volume two of this massive three-volume work,^[9] Suess set out his belief that across geologic time, the rise and fall of sea levels were mappable across the earth—that is, that the periods of ocean transgression and regression were correlateable from one continent to another. His theory was based upon glossopteris fern fossils occurring in South America, Africa, and India. His explanation was that the three lands were once connected in a supercontinent, which he named Gondwanaland. Suess believed that the oceans flooded the spaces currently between those lands.

Eduard Suess, c. 1890

In his work Die Entstehung der Alpen, Suess also introduced the concept of the biosphere, which was later extended by Vladimir I. Vernadsky in 1926.^[10] Suess wrote:

One thing seems to be foreign on this large celestial body consisting of spheres, namely, organic life. But this life is limited to a determined zone at the surface of the lithosphere. The plant, whose deep roots plunge into the soil to feed, and which at the same time rises into the air to breathe, is a good illustration of organic life in the region of interaction between the upper sphere and the lithosphere, and on the surface of continents it is possible to single out an independent biosphere.

He was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 1886^[11] and the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in 1895. He received the Wollaston Medal of the Geological Society of London in 1896 and he won the Copley Medal of the Royal Society in 1903.^[12] Suess died on 26 April 1914 in Vienna. He is buried in the town of Marz in Burgenland, Austria.

Legacy

Suess is considered one of the early practitioners of ecology. Suess Land in Greenland, the lunar crater Suess, as well as the crater Suess on Mars, are named after him.^[13][14] In 1861, he was invited to examine the water supply of Vienna and its sanitary conditions. He examined the patterns of deaths from typhoid during an epidemic and suggested that water travelled through the cemetery which lay on high ground and mixed into the wells in the lower parts. He wrote his findings in an 1862 booklet Der Boden der Stadt Wien nach seiner Bildungsweise, Beschaffenheit und seinen Beziehungen zum Bürgerlichen Leben which became so popular that he was elected to the city council in 1863. He then suggested that drinking water be brought from further away by aqueducts to the city. This system was set up and inaugurated in 1873 and "Suess' water" was immortalized in Johann Strauss’ operetta Die Fledermaus.^[5]

Franz Eduard Suess

His son, Franz Eduard Suess (1867–1941), was superintendent and geologist at the Imperial Geological Institute in Vienna,^[15] who studied moldavites and coined the term tektite. The asteroid 12002 Suess, discovered by Czech astronomers Petr Pravec and Lenka Kotková in 1996, was named in his honor.^[16]

Works

• Zur Kenntniss des Stringocephalus Burtini Defrance (1853)
• Über die Brachiopoden der Kössener Schichten (1854)
• Der Boden der Stadt Wien (1862)
• Die Entstehung der Alpen (1875)
• Das Antlitz der Erde in three volumes (1885–1909) volume 1 volume 2 Volume 3 part 1 Volume 3 part 2
  • La face de la terre, (1897–1918), translation de l'allemand par Emmanuel de Margerie, préface par Marcel Bertrand
  • The Face of the Earth, trans. of Das Antlitz der Erde in 5 vols. (1904–1924)^[17]
• Erinnerungen (1916)