“Shrinking Sea Ice as a Prism of Climate Change Understanding”
Lunchtime Colloquium at the Rachel Carson Center with Nina Wormbs.
Lunchtime Colloquium at the Rachel Carson Center with Nina Wormbs.
In this online exhibition, historian Christian Kehrt describes how polar researcher Alfred Wegener (1880–1930) focused on gaining detailed knowledge about the origins of Greenland’s weather and climate conditions and the dynamics of its ice sheet. His expedition diaries, which are at the core of this online exhibition, are a crucial document for anyone interested in the history polar expedition. His dense and well-preserved diaries allow for a detailed look into everyday life, continuities, and changes in polar exploration in the first half of the twentieth century.
In 2013, Christian Kehrt published one of the Environment & Society Portal’s first virtual exhibitions, “The Wegener Diaries: Scientific Expeditions into the Eternal Ice.” The exhibition was updated in March 2020 to make the exhibition responsive and archivable, with only minor changes to the presentation. This page contains links to PDFs of the original 2013 version of exhibition, scans of the original document, and selected transcribed and translated diary entries for archival purposes.
“The Wegener Diaries: Scientific Expeditions Into the Eternal Ice” was created by Christian Kehrt (2013) under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported International license. This refers only to the text and does not include image rights. Please click on an image to view its individual rights status. Thumbnails of the following images appear on the exhibition landing page:
Historian Christian Kehrt presents a short biographical profile of geologist and polar explorer Alfred Wegener, with historic photographs. Wegener’s diaries from his three Greenland expeditions (1906–1931)—digitized, transcribed, and translated—are the focus of this Virtual Exhibition.
Commenting actual film footage from Alfred Wegener’s last Greenland expedition, literary historian Dorit Müller describes the content and context of this unique material.
Covering four expeditions between 1906–1930, Alfred Wegener’s Greenland diaries are presented in an overview by historian Christian Kehrt.
This is a selection of the original diary entries of German explorer Alfred Wegener’s last Greenland expedition in 1930 and is part of the virtual exhibition “The Wegener Diaries: Scientific Expeditions into the Eternal Ice” authored by historian Christian Kehrt.
This is a selection of original diary entries of German explorer Alfred Wegener, who participated in the Danish North Greenland Expedition (1912–1913) and is part of the virtual exhibition “The Wegener Diaries - Scientific Expeditions into the Eternal Ice” authored by historian Christian Kehrt.