Everything about Eduard Suess totally explained
Eduard Suess (
August 20,
1831 –
April 26,
1914) was a
geologist who was an expert on the
geography of the
Alps. He is responsible for discovering two of the Earth's major now-lost geographical features, the
supercontinent Gondwana (proposed 1861) and the
Tethys Ocean.
Born in
London to a
Saxon merchant, when he was three his family relocated to
Prague, then to
Vienna when he was 14. Interested in
geology at a young age, he published his first paper (on the geology of
Carlsbad, now in the
Czech Republic) when he was 19.
By
1857 he was a professor of geology at the
University of Vienna, and from there he gradually developed views on the connection between
Africa and
Europe; eventually he came to the conclusion that the Alps to the north were once at the bottom of an ocean, of which the Mediterranean was a remnant. While not quite correct (mostly because
plate tectonics hadn't yet been discovered — he used the earlier
geosyncline theory), this is close enough to the truth that he's credited with discovering the
Tethys Ocean, which he named in
1893.
His other major discovery was that the
glossopteris fern was found in fossils in
South America,
Africa, and
India (as well as
Antarctica, though Suess didn't know this). His explanation was that the three lands were once connected into a supercontinent, which he named
Gondwanaland. Again, this isn't quite correct: Suess believed that the oceans flooded the spaces currently between those lands, when in fact the lands drifted apart. Still, it's similar enough to what is currently believed that his naming has stuck.
Suess is considered one of the early practitioners of
ecology. He published a comprehensive synthesis of his ideas in
1885-
1901, entitled
Das Antlitz der Erde (translated as "The Face of the Earth"), which was a popular textbook for many years. In this work Suess also introduced the concept of the
biosphere, which was later extended by
Vladimir I. Vernadsky in
1926. In his writing he didn't explicity define the term:
He won the
Copley Medal of the
Royal Society in
1903.
Suess crater on the
Moon and a
crater on
Mars are named after him.
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