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″N16°24′57.932″E / 47.71860861°N 16.41609222°E /47.71860861; 16.41609222 |
| Alma mater | University of Vienna |
| Known for | Biosphere,Gondwana,Tethys Ocean,Das Antlitz der Erde,eustatic theory,sima,sial |
| Spouse | Herminenée 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 |
Eduard Suess (Austrian German:[ˈeːdu.ardˈsyːs]; 20 August 1831 – 26 April 1914) was an Austriangeologist and an expert on thegeography of theAlps. He is responsible for hypothesising two major former geographical features, thesupercontinentGondwana (proposed in 1861) and theTethys Ocean.
Eduard Suess was born on 20 August 1831 in London, England, the oldest son of Adolph Heinrich Suess,[1] aLutheranSaxon 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;[4] Eleonore Friederike Zdekauer was born in Prague, now part of theCzech Republic, which once belonged to theHoly Roman Empire and theAustrian Empire.
When Eduard Suess was an infant, his family relocated to Prague, and then to Vienna when he was 14. He became interested ingeology at a young age. At the age of 19, while working as an assistant at theHofmuseum in Vienna, he published his first paper—on the geology of Carlsbad (nowKarlovy Vary in the Czech Republic). In 1855, Suess married Hermine Strauss, the daughter of a prominent physician from Prague. Their marriage produced five sons and one daughter.[2]
In 1856, he was appointed professor of paleontology at theUniversity of Vienna, and in 1861 was appointed professor of geology.[5] 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 theTethys Ocean, which he named in 1893.[6] He claimed in 1885 that land bridges had connected South America, Africa, India, Australia, and Antarctica, creating a supercontinent which he namedGondwanaland.[7]
Suess published a comprehensive synthesis of his ideas between 1885 and 1901 titledDas 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,[8] 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 ofocean transgression andregression were correlateable from one continent to another. His theory was based uponglossopteris 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. Again, this is not quite correct: Suess believed that the oceans flooded the spaces currently between those lands.
In his workDie Entstehung der Alpen, Suess also introduced the concept of thebiosphere, which was later extended byVladimir I. Vernadsky in 1926.[9] 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 thelithosphere. 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 theAmerican Philosophical Society in 1886[10] and theRoyal Swedish Academy of Sciences in 1895. He received theWollaston Medal of theGeological Society of London in 1896 and he won theCopley Medal of theRoyal Society in 1903.[11] Suess died on 26 April 1914 in Vienna. He is buried in the town ofMarz inBurgenland, Austria.
Suess is considered one of the early practitioners ofecology.Suess Land in Greenland, the lunar craterSuess, as well as the craterSuess on Mars, are named after him.[12][13]
His son, Franz Eduard Suess (1867–1941), was superintendent and geologist at the Imperial Geological Institute in Vienna,[14] who studiedmoldavites and coined the termtektite. The asteroid12002 Suess, discovered by Czech astronomersPetr Pravec andLenka Kotková in 1996, was named in his honor.[15]
