* This is Part 2 of a three-part installment of “Problematica.” In Part 1 Max discussed the amphibious geology of Charles Lyell, focusing on the character of Lyell’s “amphibious being.” Part 2 examines the world view of Eduard Suess (Lyell’s most influential successor), again focusing on a fictional geologist: the extraterrestrial observer…
Greatness, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. Still, if you were to make a list of the very greatest geologists of all time, relatively few people would vie for the top spot. If the matter were put to a vote (never mind who is qualified to vote on such a thing) Charles Lyell would appear on many ballets. James Hutton too, although in this case professional opinion is more divided (Sengor 2020). In the twentieth century, J. Tuzo Wilson and Arthur Holmes would receive consideration. Someone would vote for Nicholas Steno. Someone, perhaps, would vote for a living scientist (like Maureen Raymo, the first woman to win the Wollaston Prize at the absurd date of 2014). Yet if I had a ballot, I would probably cast it for Eduard Suess, the master geologist of the late nineteenth century.
Eduard Suess (1831–1914), photographed near the end of his life
It is a cruelty of thumbnail history that Suess’s legacy has been reduced to the naming of Gondwana-land. Arguably no geologist achieved more in the space of a career; the magnitude of his accomplishment defies any attempt at succinct description. Just consider some of the concepts he is responsible for introducing. In addition to “Gondwana-land” there is:
eustasy, [the] Tethys [Sea], foreland, [hinterland,] listric fault, horst, graben, batholith, island arc, foredeep, Atlantic- and Pacific-type continental margins […] the Altaids, Sarmatian Stage, Angara-land, Russian Platform (or Table), Laurentia, Caledonian mountains, Variscan mountains, shield, back thrusting, forefolding, [and] Zwischengebirge [a special type of median mass lying between divergent branches of an orogen] (Sengor 2014, 7)
If this seems like a ragbag of jargon, it isn't. Many of the terms underpin key elements of Suess’s tectonic synthesis: for example, eustasy, Atlantic- and Pacific-type continental margins, and the concept of a foreland basin including a foredeep. Others denote paleogeographic features that retain their basic validity today. Gondwana-land, Laurentia, and Angara-land (now, Siberia) name paleocontinents that once snuggled together in the supercontinent Pangea. Tethys names a former ocean that formed when Gondwana separated from Laurasia (the landmass that included Laurentia and Siberia, along with Baltica and a few smaller terranes). The Caledonian and Variscan mountains record major episodes of mountain building during the Paleozoic, now known to be associated with plate collisions. Finally, horst and graben are generic terms for bits of crust bordered by normal faults, as in the Basin and Range Province of the American West.*
[* Somehow, this only scratches the surface. Perhaps Suess’s defining accomplishment was his account of the origin of the alps by lateral shortening, with extension and subsidence (causing earthquakes and volcanism) in the “rear.” He put forward the interpretation in Die Enstehung der Alpen (“The Origin of the Alps,” 1875), in which book he also coined the term “biosphere”— but I'll stop.]
Top: a map of the paleocontinents of the upper Carboniferous including Gondwana-land and “Asien” (a close approximation of “Angara-land”). Note the inclusion of Australia in Gondwana-Land: this is something Suess changed his mind on between the first and third volume of Das Antlitz. Note also the Tethys Sea, here incorrectly drawn to include the Caribbean. (For Suess, the Tethys was sealed to the west by Triassic-age deposits near Gibraltar.) From Wilhelm Bolsche’s Das Leben der Urwelt (1932)
Bottom: A schematic cross-section of Asia, combined from two sections which appear in an unnumbered plate in the English translation of Das Antlitz; reproduced from Sengor (2014), with text enlarged for legibility. Notice the “foreland sinking below folded chains” on the right-hand side of the figure. (The foreland is the Pacific Ocean.) This represents one lithospheric block overthrusting another: a process Suess held to be responsible for crustal shortening and mountain building
This is the second part of a three-part essay. In Part 1, I examined Charles Lyell’s “world view,” taking inspiration from the “amphibious being” that enlivens the fifth chapter of Principles of Geology. Now it is time to do the same thing for Suess, focusing on the extraterrestrial observer that greets the reader on opening Das Antlitz der Erde. My claim is that we can learn a great deal about these geologists by examining the fictional characters they included in their greatest works. We can even resolve a historiographical dilemma that has sprung up around the claim that Suessian tectonics “pave[d] the way for the demise of Lyellian geology in late-nineteenth-century Europe” (Greene 1982, 191).
But all in good time. Before diving into to Das Antlitz, it will be useful to say a bit more about the background to the work. Then, after we have met the extraterrestrial observer, we will return to the historiographical puzzle that motivates this essay (Part 3).
Assembling a world view
Eduard Suess was born in 1831 to Austrian parents living in London. According to a later recollection, his interest in geology was sparked by an encounter with the early Paleozoic fossils of the Barrandian basin following the family’s move to Prague:
The sight of a long extinct marine population, the thought of the immense changes that the country had experienced and the realization that a strike of my hammer might expose an image that nobody before me had seen gripped my fantasy to such an extent that it was impossible to keep my attention on any other study. (Suess 1916, 71–2)
Soon he was engaged as a researcher at the Hofmineralienkabinett— the family had moved again, this time to Vienna— where he built an international reputation as a paleontologist (Sengor 2022). He also volunteered for the geological survey, where he worked under Franz von Hauer, tasked with mapping “a cross-section across the Alps from Passau in the north to Duino in the south” (Sengor 2015, 186). Suess ended up mapping the highest part of the geotraverse where he collected many fossils of Triassic age (1854). These gave him the key to correlating the Alpine Mesozoic sequences with those of the foreland, resolving what had been a major puzzle in stratigraphic geology. The work came to the attention of Charles Lyell, who included a description of the correlation in a supplement to the new edition of A Manual of Elementary Geology (1857).* It was this discovery that occasioned the correspondence I alluded to in beginning of Part 1.
[* Lyell was no one’s idea of an Alpine geologist. Still, he had a personal reason for perking up at Suess’s discovery. In the middle of the nineteenth century, it was known that upper Permian and lower Triassic deposits were fossil-poor. This made it seem as if some calamity had been visited upon the ancient earth— in modern parlance, a mass extinction. Lyell’s world view had no room for such a calamity. He therefore greeted with enthusiasm the “discovery of thick Triassic deposits teeming with life” (Sengor 2015, 187): “We can now no longer doubt that, should we hereafter have an opportunity of studying an equally rich marine fauna of the age of the Bunter sandstone or Lower Trias, the great discordance between Paleozoic and Neozoic forms would almost disappear…” (Lyell 1857, 28).]
Two plates from Suess (1855) illustrated by Suess. As Sengor (2022) points out, the illustrations render in detail the parts of the specimen Suess intends to discuss, with the rest depicted only in outline. “This characteristic of Suess’ illustrations is seen also in his later field sketches concerning stratigraphy and structural geology and also in his depiction of the large tectonic features of our globe representing a guide to his manner of thinking.” These above plates were published in conjunction with remarks describing a new (and still valid) genus of brachiopod, Meganteris
In 1857, Suess secured an appointment as professor of paleontology at the University of Vienna. There he poured himself into teaching and fieldwork (and politics; Suess was elected to the Vienna town council in 1863, where he successfully lobbied for a system of aqueducts to bring clean drinking water from the Alps). An interest in the structure of the Vienna Basin soon expanded to include correlative areas, including areas outside the Austrian Empire. Two observations in particular caught his attention (Sengor 2021):
[First,] the Tertiary stratigraphy observed in the Vienna basin could be extended, in the same sequence and at similar elevations above sea-level, all the way east to the region of the Aral Sea and west almost as far as Switzerland. This inspired him to question the theory of independent vertical motions of continents… advocated by Sir Charles Lyell and his followers. The persistence of the undeformed stratigraphy for such immense distances… could not be explained by differential vertical motions. [How could a block of crust, divided into so many fragments, be uniformly uplifted without any mutual displacement of the parts? —MD] He thought it must have been the global sea level that was changing… [requiring ocean basins] to have changed their capacity throughout geological time. But how did they do [this]?
Another surprising field observation helped him to think of a mechanism. He found that an anticlinal structure [an arch-like fold— in this case, a nearly recumbent one]… accompanied the Alpine front [from Geneva to Krakow; see the illustration below]. He had earlier seen, during a mapping exercise in the Alps, that the Alpine “central massifs” [then thought to be responsible for raising the Alps as intrusive masses]… could not have done that, because their erosional debris was contained in the early Mesozoic sequences. [If debris from the massifs was contained in the overlying sediments, then the massifs had to be older than these sediments, making it impossible for them to have pushed the sediments up. —MD] ... Suess realized that [it was] not vertical, magma-driven, uplift, but lateral shortening [that] was responsible for the origin of the Alps. His excursions in Italy further showed him that while shortening was going on in the external parts of the Apennines, stretching and subsidence, accompanied by active volcanism, dominated the internal parts, there creating the Tyrrhenian Sea. (Sengor 2021, 26)
Foldout illustration from Suess (1868) showing the anticlinal fold in front of the Alps as heavy lines. As Sengor (2015) observes: “Suess believed these anticlines to be parts of a single structure which indicate[d] the northerly push of the entire Alpine body”
The Tyrrhenian Sea is a significant basin whose creation would have affected sea level, at least in the Mediterranean. But what Suess really needed was a way of summoning tens, or even hundreds, of meters of global sea-level change. This he found in the writings of Constant Prévost: sometimes known as the “French Lyell” for his fanatical adherence to causes actuelles (Bork 2018). Prévost’s bête noire was the concept of elevation. In particular, he was opposed to the idea that volcanic mountains were formed by the rapid upward bulging of sediments by magmatic intrusions (Dean 1980). Called the theory of “elevation craters,” it was, in all strictness, a theory of volcanoes. But it suggested a more general theory in which mountain ranges are formed by the intrusion of granite bodies along a rift. This made sense of the observation that granite is exposed in the “core” of many mountain chains, like the Sierra Nevada in California. But to Prévost the whole suggestion was wrongheaded. His objection was anchored in a detailed study of Italian and French volcanoes, none of which showed any evidence of violent emplacement. Instead, each volcano seemed to have grown by the accumulation of discharges around a vent, layer upon molten layer (Sengor 2015).
An “ideal transverse section of a mountain range [according to the theory of vertical uplift],” from George Poulett Scrope’s Considerations on Volcanos (1825). Notice that the mountain range is here imagined as basically symmetrical about its granitic core, reflecting its origin by emplacement. This is something Suess would later challenge with his characterization of mountain ranges as “one-sided,” or asymmetrical
But Prévost did not stop there. Having gotten rid of elevation craters— to his satisfaction, anyway— he next tried to discredit the very concept of uplift. He reasoned that if uplift is a major geological process, then mountain chains must sometimes rise from the seafloor. But if mountains sometimes rise from the seafloor, then the capacity of ocean basins must sometimes fall, forcing water onto the land. Since this has never happened (Prévost claimed), uplift cannot be an important geological process. Yes, the earth’s crust is sometimes disturbed, producing local elevation of the sort found in mountain chains. But the motor of the process is subsidence, or “the shrinking and contraction of the consolidated crust of the earth” (Prévost 1839). It is subsidence that is responsible for “the folds, the undulations, the ruptures, and the depressions which constitute the present surface features of the earth” (Prévost 1840, 201). Also, it is subsidence that has produced a universal and unidirectional retreat of the sea from the land— a “marine regression.”
Now, Suess knew that marine transgressions were a fact of history, so there could be no question of adopting the Frenchman’s view whole-hog. Still, he helped himself to a good deal of the picture, including its critique of magmatic intrusion as the motor of mountain building. He also endorsed Prévost’s version of the shrinking earth theory, in which the foundering of bits of crust
increased the capacity of ocean basins, producing regressions; and
stimulated mountain building— in Suess’s view, by a complex process in which an upper rind of subsiding crust is thrust over a foreland, creating folds and faults in front of the block and extension behind it.
Prévost’s famous analogy for the shrinking earth was an apple that shrivels as it dries out. The analogy did not really capture the process by which a shrinking earth was supposed to produce elevation. But it dramatized the point that topography can be produced in the absence of a force pushing up mountains from beneath. Der Zusammenbruch des Erdballes ist es, dem wir beiwohnen, Suess would later say— “What we are witnessing is the collapse of the terrestrial globe” (Suess 1885, 778; 1904, 604). This was a slogan for a world view that differed fundamentally from Lyell’s.
The Italian Peninsula and the Tyrrhenian Sea (the water “in front of” the boot), as pictured from the Alps. Giuseppe Civelli, 1853
Suess first sketched this picture in a slim volume, Die Enstehung der Alpen. It was the beginning of a theoretical project that would occupy him for the remainder of his career. Contraction tied it all together: sea level change, mountains, volcanoes, ocean basins.
[Since] all oceans were connected, subsidence in one place would lead to a rapid global regression and to mountain-building nearby, accompanied by shortening in front of the mountain range and extension behind it. In time, the hole created at the bottom of the ocean by the local subsidence would be filled up with sediment and that would cause a slow global transgression. [Mountain ranges] were products of horizontal shortening, not axial uplift… [and] were asymmetric… Both the location of mountain ranges and the map-view of oceans were haphazard, obeying no geometrical rule or regularity [as earlier contractionists like Léonce Élie de Beaumont had argued]. (Sengor 2015, 193)
The year was 1875. Charles Lyell was dead and European geology had a new heavy hitter. Die Enstehung der Alpen was a sensation that catapulted its author’s reputation to new heights. But Suess was only getting started. Three years later, he began work on his masterpiece, Das Antlitz der Erde. It would take him thirty years to complete, at which point Suess would be nearly eighty years old and a grand old man of European geology.
But in 1878 Suess was forty-seven, full of restless energy and gripped by a synthetic appetite reminiscent of Darwin, or indeed, Lyell. In Richard Fortey’s description, “Suess sat in Vienna like an omnivorous spider with a web spread over the world, tugging in facts” (Fortey 2004, 24). “You feel that a fact foolish enough to escape Suess’s grasp was probably not worth knowing.” It is time to examine Das Antlitz der Erde.
The Face of the Earth
The observer from Mars, able to view the earth with impartial eyes, has long been a cliche of academic writing. Sometimes it is used to send up the pretensions of mere humans. So, when Karl Popper complained in 1969 that “[the] anthropologist is not the observer from Mars which he so often believes himself to be,” his message is perfectly clear. More often, however, the visitor is invoked as a neutral observer of some familiar situation, whose eyes are not encrusted by the same prejudices that cloud human vision. Were a visitor from Mars to observe the Black middle class, say— and here I quote almost randomly from a Google search— he “might suppose that [it]… would be highly gratified by its recent and dramatic rise in status.” But in this case the visitor would be in for a surprise, since on earth, material holdings do not ensure “gratification,” especially in the context of pervasive racial discrimination. Here as elsewhere, the Martian plays the role of the naif who exists to highlight the peculiarity of some situation— often, a peculiarity that vanishes when the situation is seen in light of facts on the ground.
But visitors from space do not only exist to give voice to naïve expectations. They also exist to point out features of a situation that are lost in the hurly-burly of terrestrial life. This is the role of the extraterrestrial observer that greets the reader upon opening Das Antlitz:
If we imagine an observer to approach our planet from outer space, and, pushing aside the belts of red-brown clouds which obscure our atmosphere, to gaze for a whole day on the surface of the earth that rotates beneath him, the feature beyond all others most likely to arrest his attention would be the wedge-like outline of the continents as they narrow away to the South. (Suess 1904, 1)
Now, to be sure, these features had been noted by earth-bound observers. But apart from some weak attempts at explanation— like those claiming “an excessive accumulation of water toward the South Pole”— the situation remained a puzzle. For Suess, the only explanation was that the tapering outlines were “determined by the outer parts of the planet itself”; that is, by the collapse of the crust to form deep basins.
Our observer would have no doubt on this point, if, as he had previously pushed aside the clouds, he were now to remove the sea, so that he could gaze directly on the rocky crust of the globe thus laid bare. The remarkable depth of the ocean basins as opposed to the trifling height of the continents, and the steep slope of a great part of the coasts, would then become apparent to him. (Suess 1904, 1)
Earth “supposed to be seen from space,” by Henry de la Beche (1834). This image appears as the frontispiece to Researches in Theoretical Geology. Notice the (at the time highly speculative) reconstruction of a southern continent
Apparent, and suggestive of a mechanism. But Suess does not go there yet. Instead, he hits the reader with a volley of facts. W.B. Carpenter estimates the mean height of continents at ~1,000 feet, whereas ocean basins sink to ~13,000 feet. “Krümmel, following Leipoldt, calcuates the average depth of the oceans at 440 meters [>1,400 feet], the average depth of the oceans at 3,438.4 meters [>11,000 feet],” and notes that if all inequalities of relief were flattened the surface of the planet would be covered by over two-and-a-half kilometers of water (Suess 1904, 2). “But our observer of the exposed globe would perceive a more marked contrast in relief than these figures indicate, for they have been determined without taking into consideration a circumstance which marks to a great extent the steepness of the coasts and the contrast between the land and sea, namely, the attraction which the continents exert upon the mass of the ocean.” It is not the case that the surface of the ocean is everywhere equidistant from the center of the earth. In fact, sea-level rises toward the mainland. “The shores of the continents, and the continents themselves, consequently appear much lower to the eye than is actually the case; the attraction of the sea to the land conceals to a great extent the contrast which really exists between continent and ocean.”
What then explains the extraordinary depths of the ocean? The sheer difference between the average height of the land and the seafloor seems to rule out the view that the crust rises here and falls there, like the pistons of a great steam engine. On this crucial point, Lyell and company were dead wrong. Might it then be the case that the face of the earth has been mostly stable during the long history of the planet? That the deep ocean basins, far from requiring an explanation in terms of what we now call tectonics, are an original feature of the globe? No, says Suess. What cinches the case is the great thickness of the marine deposits that have contributed to the formation of continents, especially during the Paleozoic. In central Pennsylvania, for instance, “the total thickness of deposits from the summit of the Alleghany River Coal Series to the Trenton limestone… amounts to 18,394 feet”: a figure that exceeds the average mean depth of the ocean today (Suess 1904, 4). The “high pedestals” of the continents may be very ancient, “they may even date, in great part, from the Mesozoic… but for the Palaeozoic period it would be impossible to maintain the theory of generally persistent continents.” Certainly “that part of the borders of continents which cuts across the strike of younger mountain ranges is of quite recent date.” Suess concludes that “[in] considering… the wedge-like form of the continents, we are not dealing with something which has remained unaltered since the formation of the globe.” It follows that “in any attempt to understand the movements of the earth's crust and its changes of form, this most important feature of the planetary surface must be taken into account” (5). Here is a problem for a global tectonic synthesis.
The observer pushes nearer to earth. Now, he is able to perceive “not only the outlines and the relief of the continents, but also the relations existing between their outlines and the mountain ranges they support” (Suess 1904, 5). He notices that two regions can be discerned, “marked by a difference in the relations of the boundaries of the ocean basins to the mountain chains of the continents.”
From Chittagong… down to Java, and along the Asiatic coast of the Pacific Ocean, through Japan and the Euriles, and then eastwards through the Aleutian islands to Alaska, there occur on the mainland itself, or on the long rows of bordering islands, more or less continuous lines of mountain chains, the course of which runs either parallel to the coast or in curves concave to it, so that the islands surround the mainland like so many pendent festoons; thus showing that some definite connexion unquestionably exists between the outer delimitation of the continent and its internal structure. (Suess 1904, 5)
The same thing is evident along the west coast of the United States and down through South America: this is a Pacific-type continental margin. Set against it is the Atlantic-type margin, in which coastal areas lack mountain ranges altogether. Farther inland, mountain ranges “[turn their] back to the sea” such that “no causal connexion whatever is perceptible between the coast-line and the structure of the continent” (Suess 1904, 6). “Thus the existing outlines of the aqueous envelope of the planet coincide, [in] the Pacific region, with easily recognizable features in the structure of the globe, while in the Atlantic region no such correspondence is to be observed.”*
[* These are striking observations, and certainly not the sort of thing a naïve observer could hope to discern. They are now a key part of plate tectonic theory, with Atlantic-type margins being identified with passive or rifted margins, and Pacific-type with active (subduction) margins.]
During the second half of the nineteenth century, perhaps the biggest scientific problem in geology was the origin of mountain ranges (Greene 1982). Two ranges, in particular, played key roles in the European and American contexts: the Alps and the Appalachians. But according to Suess, the “mightiest mountain chains of the earth are themselves only subordinate members of far greater structural features which dominate the whole globe. We may observe and describe in detail the disposition of the strata and the structure of any single mountain chain we please, but it will be found impossible to give an explanation of the facts it presents without taking into account the relations which exist between this particular chain and the assemblage of mountain chains in general” (Suess 1904, 6). Not for nothing did Suess title this work Das Antlitz der Erde— “The Face of the Earth.”
Suess’s depiction of the structure of the Alpine system from Das Antlitz der Erde. Consonant with his claim that the grandest mountain chains are “only subordinate members of far greater structural features,” the Alpine system does not just include the Alps; it also includes the Carpathians and the Apennines, as well as some smaller chains in North Africa and Spain (not pictured)
Our extraterrestrial observer reaches the surface of the planet. “He wanders over hill and vale, but sees scant traces of the mighty movements which have affected so many parts of the earth's surface. The ridges are worn away by wind and weather, the low ground covered with mud and sand. Great mountain ranges are reduced to hilly land or even to plains; the fractures, along which displacements of mountain segments have taken place to the extent of thousands of feet, are so completely concealed from the eye that they have only become known at all by means of subterranean workings” (Suess 1904, 6–7). Yet geology reveals what erosion and vegetation conceals. Suess mentions a fault in the Appalachians twenty miles long, with a throw of at least 20,000 feet” (7). In Utah too, “the Wahsatch mountains is thrown down… at least 30,000 feet, or even 40,000 if the Cretaceous formation be taken into account.” The surface of the earth is thus riven with deep fractures that speak of colossal vertical movements. Indeed, “[we will] have occasion to show that the crust of the earth is traversed not only by isolated faults of this kind, but by whole systems of fractures, that extensive areas have thus been broken up and have foundered into the interior of the planet.” The most extensive of these areas are the deep ocean basins, the fallen lowlands. —Der Zusammenbruch des Erdballes ist es, dem wir beiwohnen.
Stereogram of the Musinia zone of displacement according to the U.S. Survey geologists G.K. Gilbert and John Wesley Powell (reproduced in Das Antlitz der Erde)
* * *
At this point, the extraterrestrial observer has noted “the wedge-shaped outlines of our continents, then, beneath the sea, has perceived the great depth of the ocean basins; he has recognized the difference between the Pacific and Atlantic coasts, and finally the thoroughgoing concealment of great fractures” (Suess 1904, 8). Perplexed, he bends an ear to the experts. These hold forth on sundry topics from the origin of the solar system to the development of the conditions necessary for terrestrial life. But when they come to the science of stratigraphy, the observer is deluged with “[a] mass of details concerning the distribution, stratification, lithological character, technical utility, and organic remains of each subdivision of the stratified series,” with hardly a gossamer string holding them together. He interrupts with a question: Just what is a geological formation (today, a system) anyway? And what determines its beginning and end? For that matter
How is it to be explained that the very earliest of them all, the Silurian formation, recurs in parts of the earth so widely removed from one another— from Lake Ladoga to the Argentine Andes, and from Arctic America to Australia— always attended by such characteristic features, and how does it happen that particular horizons of various ages may be compared to or distinguished from other horizons over such large areas, that in fact these stratigraphical subdivisions extend over the whole globe? (Suess 1904, 8)
These are the kind of questions the observer expects will have settled answers. But among geologists there is a great difference of opinion. The reason, Suess suggests, is that there is no general explanation of why fossils keep time as effectively as they do. Put differently, there is no general account of why the fossilized contents of rocks should constitute a unique time-signature, such that finding fossils of a certain type in a stratum anywhere in the world warrants the claim that that stratum formed during a particular interval (see Dresow 2021). Darwin, in The Origin, had shown that part of the explanation is that lineages evolve and extinction is forever. But the fossil record didn’t look as Darwinian theory seemed to predict. (Darwin blew smoke over this fact by claiming, after Lyell, that the geological record is highly incomplete, with not a page in twenty of life’s history preserved.) “[The] fact remains,” Suess writes, “that we do not find species varying gradually within the limits of single families or genera, and at different times, but that whole groups, entire animal and vegetable populations, or, if I may so express myself, complete economic unities of Nature appear together, and together disappear” (Suess 1904, 11).
This is the more remarkable, as the transformations effected in the populations of the sea and in those of the land by no means invariably coincide: a fact which has been proved in the most convincing manner by a study of the various subdivisions of the Tertiary formation in the Vienna basin. From this we may conclude with certainty that the determining factors in this case have been changes in the external conditions of life. (Suess 1904, 11)
Nothing but a change in external conditions can explain the coordinated appearance and disappearance of whole ensembles of taxa. And nothing but a global change can explain the “synchronism of the subdivisions in one province and another,” which is to say, the observation that “throughout the whole earth… the well-known general type of the Jurassic formation [succeeds] the equally well-known type of the Cretaceous," and so forth. “On this fact depends the unity of stratigraphical terminology,” Suess grandly declares (12). Absent some “great rhythmical process,” it would be puzzling if names “which were originally chosen to describe the [deposits] in a limited portion of Europe” were found to apply to stratified series the world over. But they do apply; so “[global] physical causes of faunal transformations” must form “the true basis for a delimitation of chronological periods” (14).
An early draft of the modern geological timescale, from Phillips (1860)
Das Antlitz, then, is not only about the grand structural features our observed studied on his approach to the planet. It is also about the structure of the stratigraphic record and its causal explanation; or, what comes to the same thing, the physical basis of correlation and the natural divisions of the stratigraphic series. Writes Sengor: “The reader gets the feeling that the whole book was written, because its author felt that he had solved the one great and central problem of geology: precise correlation of rocks the world over that keep the record of the history of the earth” (Sengor 2014, 55).
But what is the solution exactly? What physical causes are responsible for the great rhythmical process that produces the large-scale features of the stratigraphic record? And what controls the gaps in sedimentary deposition that bookend the great geological formations (systems)? Probably there is no single answer to this question, Suess thinks. But “[the] manner in which contraction of the earth's crust manifests itself on the surface of the planet, in the formation of folds and faults, does not accord with the hypothesis of moving continental masses, which, over wide areas, repeatedly ascend and descend in a slow and uniform manner” (14). This is another shot at Lyell, whose vertical tectonics is perhaps the main target of the book (Sengor 2014). Recall that for Lyell, bits of crust are always being nudged up and down. The highest mountains are the bits of crust that have been nudged up the most. The deepest basins are the bits that have been nudged down the furthest. The picture implies that strandlines (ancient shorelines above sea level) ought to be associated with signs of tectonic disturbance of the sort Darwin witnessed in Chile:
But even a hasty consideration of such strand-lines suffices to show their complete and absolute independence of the geological structure of the coast. In Italy the lines of former sea-levels are met with on the various promontories of the Apennines in undisturbed horizontality, here on limestone, there on the ancient rocks of Calabria, here once more on the ash cone of Aetna. The complete absence of any relation between the ancient shore-lines and the structure of the mountains may be proved by hundreds of examples. But the supposition of a uniform elevation or depression of a continent, so complicated, and divided into so many fragments, without any mutual displacement of the parts— a supposition necessary to explain the horizontal course of these lines on the separate portions of a mountain complex— cannot be brought into harmony with our present knowledge of the structure of the mountains themselves. [Recall the similar argument in “Assembling a World View.”] Thus this circumstance, too, leads us to infer independent movements of the sea, that is to say, changes in the form of the hydrosphere. (Suess 1904, 15)
It is not the continents that are going up and down like elevators. It is the sea, driven now by the collapse of the seafloor (producing regressions), now by the infilling of the collapsed sinks (producing transgressions). These changes have biological consequences. When the sea drains from the continents and shallow shelves, much prime real estate is lost. This produces a pulse of extinction that is worldwide in extent and accompanied by a gap in the stratigraphic record. Later, when the sea returns, those taxa that survived the extinction pulse radiate into aqua nova, producing the life forms characteristic of the new geological period.
All this is down to tectonics. It is tectonics that controls the structure of the geological record by determining when sediments accumulate on continental margins and when erosion predominates. Likewise it is tectonics that controls the evolutionary processes responsible for stratigraphically diagnostic faunal transitions. In both cases, contraction-driven collapse is the ultimate culprit: the head honcho. Yet it is sea-level change that serves as the dutiful and effective henchman: the one who carries out the “plan.” Take a moment and marvel at how it all fits together. It is a world view to rival Lyell’s: coherent, consistent, and driven by a restless logic. It is the great synthetic achievement— indeed the culmination— of nineteenth century geology.
* * *
We rejoin “our imaginary observer, wanderer, and listener” a final time. He has left the lecture room and made his way to the library. There he finds Das Antlitz lying open on a table. Suess warns him (too modestly, I think) that he will not find an answer to his question in its pages. “This answer is the great task of the next generation of investigators. Here we will only attempt by a critical synthesis of new observations to dissipate many ancient errors and to prepare the way for an unprejudiced survey” (Suess 1904, 15). Perhaps. But Suess certainly attempts an answer in the book. It’s just that he knows too much to claim that his answer is in any sense a final one. As Suess wrote in 1890:
The natural scientist must know that his work is nothing else but climbing from one error to another, but, with the realisation that getting closer and closer to the truth, similar to one who climbs from crag to crag and, even if he does not reach the summit, he sees the landscape open up before his eyes in ever more majestic sceneries. (Suess 1904, 15)
An inspiring line of the sort that philosophers like to make fun of. But in this case, it is not far off the truth. Suess really did see farther than his predecessors. Many of his interpretations have stood the test of time. And yet with the consolidation of plate tectonics (which incorporated elements of Suessian tectonics while discarding its causal engine), the world view of Das Antlitz was destroyed. It is a shame that we have also largely forgotten the book, and the man.
* Well there I went and got carried away again. I had planned to wrap this essay up in Part 2, but I sense I’ve already taxed your patience enough. We’ll give this essay a proper conclusion in Part 3.
References
* A note on the references. This essay is heavily indebted to the work of Celal Sengor, especially his (2014) and (2015). These are excellent references on all things Suess. The former is even available open access, and is an incredibly interesting and informative read. (If you don’t know about Sengor, he is a colorful figure with some genuinely bizarre and upsetting remarks to his name. Also this.) In addition to Sengor’s work, I have made use of two other secondary sources: Mott Greene’s Geology in the Nineteenth Century and David Oldroyd’s discussion of Suess in Earth Cycles. You can find the complete text of the English translation of Das Antlitz Der Erde here.
Bork, K.B. 2018. Constant Prévost (1787–1856)— the life and contributions of a French uniformitarian. Journal of Geological Education 38:21–27.
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De la Beche, H. 1834. Researches in Theoretical Geology. London: Charles Knight.
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Greene, M. 1982. Geology in the Nineteenth Century: Changing Views of a Changing World. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Lyell, C. 1857. Supplement to the fifth edition of A Manuel of Elementary Geology. London: John Murray.
Oldroyd, D. 2006. Earth Cycles: A Historical Perspective. Westport: Greenwood.
Prévost, C., 1839. [Discussion without title]. Bulletin de la Société Géologique de France, 1e série, 10, 430.
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Sengor, A.M.C. 2014. Eduard Suess and global tectonics: an illustrated short guide. Austrian Journal of Earth Sciences 107:6–82.
Sengor, A.M.C. 2015. The founder of modern geology died 100 years ago: the scientific work and legacy of Eduard Suess. Geoscience Canada 42:181–246.
Sengor, A.M.C. 2020. Revising the Revisions: James Hutton’s Reputation among Geologists in the Late Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries. Boulder: Geological Society of America.
Sengor, A.M.C. 2021. 190th anniversary of the birth of Eduard Suess, the founder of modern global geology. GSA Today 31:26–28.
Sengor, A.M.C. 2022. Eduard Suess and paleontology: his Illustrations. Earth Sciences History 40:461–502.
Suess, E. 1855. Über Meganteris, eine neue Gattung von Terebratuliden. Sitzungsberichte der Kaiserlichen Academie der Wissenschaften in Wien, mathematisch-naturwissenschaftliche Klasse 18:51–65.
Suess, E. 1868. Bemerkungen über die Lagerung des Salzgebirges bei Wieliczka. Sitzungsberiche der kaiserlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften-mathematisch- naturwissenschaftliche Klasse. 58:541–547.
Suess, E. 1875. Die Entstehung der Alpen. W. Braumüller, Wien.
Suess, E. 1883, Das Antlitz der Erde, v. Ia (Erste Abtheilung). F. Tempsky, Prague and G. Freytag, Leipzig.
Suess, E. 1890. Über die Struktur Europas. Vorträge des Vereins zur Verbreitung Naturwissenschaftlicher Kenntnisse in Wien, 30 (1):1–21.
Suess, E. 1904. The Face of the Earth (Das Antlitz der Erde), trans. W.J. Sollas. Oxford: The Clarendon Press.
Suess, E. 1916. Erinnerungen. S. Hirzel, Leipzig.