Georg Adolf Otto Wüst | |
---|---|
Born |
June 15, 1890 Posen, Germany (today Poland) |
Died |
November 8, 1977 (aged 87) Erlangen, Germany |
Nationality | German |
Fields | oceanographer |
Institutions | University of Kiel |
Alma mater | University of Berlin |
Doctoral advisor | Alfred Merz |
Known for | Atlantic Ocean, German Atlantic expedition |
Georg Adolf Otto Wüst (*15 June 1890 in Posen, Germany (now Poznan, Poland); †8 November 1977 in Erlangen, Germany) was a German oceanographer. His pioneering work on the Atlantic Ocean provided a new view of the motions of water masses between the northern and southern hemispheres and the first evidence of the concentration of water mass spreading in western boundary currents.
Wüst was the son of the Prussian civil servant Max Wüst and his wife Clara. The family soon moved to Berlin, Germany. He attended the Charlottenburg high school in Berlin. He then studied geography and oceanography, with additional education in meteorology, mathematics and physics, at the Friedrich-Wilhelm-University in Berlin (see Humboldt University of Berlin) from 1910 . His most important teachers were Albrecht Penck and in particular Alfred Merz. Penck had been the head of the geographic department, including the Museum of Marine Sciences (German: Museum für Meereskunde), since 1905. The Austrian hydrographer Alfred Merz became his successor in 1910. The Institute and Museum of Marine Sciences became an independent unit of the university in 1920, with Merz as director.
In 1912 Merz made it possible for Wüst to join Bjørn Helland-Hansen in Bergen/Norway, thus getting to know the Norwegian colleagues’ methods. Wüst then gained practical experience in ocean observations by working on lightships, on surveying vessels and during cruises on the Norwegian research vessel “Armauer Hansen” in the Nordic Seas led by Helland-Hansen. Merz became Wüst’s advisor for his doctoral thesis. Although Wüst passed the examinations in 1914, he only received the degree in 1919 when his thesis was printed after World War I. During the war he served as a meteorologist and was wounded near Verdun in 1917. After the war he became an assistant of Merz and participated in several research cruises in the North and Baltic Seas.
Merz was planning a systematic hydrographic survey of the Atlantic Ocean. His proposal was met with approval by the key scientific institution in Germany after World War I, the Emergency Association of German Science (see Notgemeinschaft der Deutschen Wissenschaft). The German survey ship Meteor was made available for observations in the South Atlantic and the North Atlantic up to 30°N. Wüst participated in much of the planning and then joined the cruise from 1925 to 1927. When the chief scientist Merz died in Buenos Aires in June 1925, Wüst took over the leadership for the oceanographic observations.