Athena Review Image Archive ™
Eduard Suess, portrait (1869)
Portrait of Edward Suess (photo: 1869).
Eduard Suess (1831 – 1914) was an Austrian geologist who specialized in the geography of the Alps, and was a pioneer in the subject of continental drift. He correctly identified two major ancient geographical features, the supercontinent Gondwana and the Tethys Ocean.
Suess coined the name Gondwana in 1861, based on the widespread Permian distribution of Glossopteris, fern-like trees first observed in Gondwana province in India. During the Permian and early Triassic periods, Glossopteris occurred across Brazil, Australia, Africa, Madagascar, India, and Antarctica, representing several now detached landmasses. Based on its distribution in now separate continents, Suess proposed that the southern continents were once amalgamated into a single supercontinent which he named Gondwana.
Suess
thus perceived the
occurrence of continental drift, later explained more accurately
by
the German geologist Alfred Wegener in the 1920s, who coined the name
Pangaea ("All earth") for the
mega-continent incorporating both Gondwana and the northern
supercontinent Laurasia. As Wegener demonstrated, in the Permian
and Triassic periods (292-200 mya), all continental plates were
joined into the megacontinent Pangaea except China, Indonesia, and
Thailand.
The
Tethys Ocean lay on the eastern side of Pangaea. The name stems from
the mythological Greek sea goddess Tethys, sister and consort of
Oceanus. In 1893, Suess proposed, based on fossil records
from the Alps and Africa, that an ancient inland sea had once
existed between Laurasia and the continents which formed Gondwana. By
the 1960s, existence of the Tethys Ocean has been confirmed by plate
tectonics and other geological and fossil evidence.
Suess published his theories between 1885 and 1901 in the three-volume work Das Antlitz der Erde ("The Face of the Earth"), which was a popular textbook for many years.
References:
Suess, Eduard 1885-1901. Das Antlitz der Erde ("The Face of the Earth").
Wegener, Alfed 1920. Die Entstehung der Kontinente und Ozeane ("The Origin of Contents and Oceans").
Copyright © 1996-2020 Rust Family Foundation (All Rights Reserved).