German Atlantic Expedition

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Expedition ship Meteor

The German Atlantic Expedition explored the Atlantic between South America and Africa with the help of the research vessel Meteor, which was put into service for this purpose . The ship left Wilhelmshaven on April 16, 1925 and returned there on June 2, 1927.

prehistory

Meteor blueprint

In 1919, soon after the lost World War, the idea arose to fly the flag again on the oceans with the help of a naval research vessel. These plans only became more concrete a few years later, when Alfred Merz , professor at the Institute for Oceanography in Berlin, was able to inspire Friedrich Schmidt-Ott , the president of the Emergency Association of German Science , founded in 1920, for these plans. Even Fritz Haber , director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry in Berlin, was behind the project. Haber hoped, among other things, to win gold from the sea for the reparations payments made by the empire, if the previously known concentration could be confirmed. A secondary purpose of the trip was to show the Germans abroad in South America and in the former German South West Africa .

Scientific staff

The scientific staff headed by Alfred Merz included u. a. on:

Course of the trip

Travel plan (A.Merz)

In 14 east-west profiles, the Atlantic Ocean (and the atmosphere above it) between South America and Africa was examined and measured under various aspects. The echo sounder developed by Alexander Behm in 1913 was used for the ongoing depth recordings . On February 24, 1926, the expedition reached the southernmost point at 63 degrees for 51 minutes. The ship was immortalized on the map when, on February 18, 1926, at 48 ° 16 ′  S , 8 ° 16 ′  E, a bank with a shallowest depth of only 560 m was discovered and called the “ Meteor Bank ”. The deepest point in the South Atlantic was also found on the edge of the South Sandwich Islands , then measured at 8050 m, today the meteor depth is given as 8264 m.

Merz fell ill soon after the trip began and died on August 16, 1925 in Buenos Aires . The commandant, sea captain Fritz Spieß , then formally took over the scientific management, while Georg Wüst took over the technical responsibility .

Result of the trip

The 16 volumes of results published by Defant appeared until 1941, and the evaluation of the trip lasted until the 1960s. Already at the end of the trip it was clear from measurements that the gold content of the sea was far too low for economic exploitation.

See also

literature

  • R. Hoheisel-Huxmann: The German Atlantic Expedition 1925-1927 . Convent-Verlag, 2007. ISBN 978-3-86633-005-4
  • Ralph Hahn: Gold from the sea. The research of the Nobel Prize winner Fritz Haber in the years 1922–1927 . GNT publishing house. ISBN 978-3-928186-46-9
  • Albert Defant (Ed.): Scientific results of the German Atlantic expedition on the research and survey ship “Meteor” 1925–1927 . de Gruyter, Berlin 1932–1941.
  • F. Spieß: The meteor ride. Research and experiences of the German Atlantic Expedition . Publishing house Dietrich Reimers, Berlin 1928.
  • Notgemeinschaft der Deutschen Wissenschaft (Ed.): The German Atlantic Expedition on the surveying and research ship “Meteor” 1925–1927. Reprints from the journal of the Gesellschaft für Erdkunde zu Berlin, year 1926, No. 1 to year 1927, No. 7/8, scan of the special prints (PDF; 33.73 MB), accessed on February 1, 2019.
  • William J. Emery and Walter Zenk: Captain Fritz Spiess and the German Meteor Expedition 1925-27 with a German foreword. BrownWalker Press, 2019. ISBN 978-1-62734-712-9 .

Web links

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