Abstract
The Danish Greenland cartographer and geologist Lauge Koch (1892–1964) was a legend at the time of his last public appearance, in Hamilton Hall at McMaster University in March 1964. Before he was 30 years old, he had charted the entire coastline of North Greenland by dogsled (19 sheets at 1:300K scale) and had described the essential features of its geologic structure and stratigraphy (Haller 1971; Dawes 1976; Dawes and Haller 1979). This was made possible by opportunities arising from threats to Danish sovereignty over North Greenland by the United States prior to 1917, when the American claim based on Robert E. Peary’s 1891–1909 expeditions was relinquished as part of a deal whereby they acquired the Virgin Islands, formerly Danish West Indies. In 1926, Koch shifted his activities to East Greenland, where a providential Norwegian challenge to Danish sovereignty in 1931 enabled him to establish a large, international, multidisciplinary research and mapping program, utilizing ship-based float planes and flying boats for systematic aerial photography, support of land parties, and navigation through sea ice. Oskar Kulling, a member of Koch’s 1929 expedition, discovered Devonian vertebrate assemblages sensationally containing the earliest known tetrapod, Ichthyostega (Jarvik 1961; Clack 2002; Larsen et al. 2008). Supported by the Greenland Ministry of the Danish government, independent of the federal Geological Survey, Koch’s East Greenland expeditions continued for twenty-three field seasons until 1958 (Koch 1961), culminating after his death with tectonic and geological maps of East Greenland (Haller 1970; Koch and Haller 1971) and the magnificent book, Geology of the East Greenland Caledonides (Haller 1971). Koch was lionized internationally—he received medals, national honours and honourary degrees in eight foreign countries and was venerated at Yale, Harvard, Columbia and McGill universities (Muller 1964; Dunbar 1966)—but in Denmark he was a controversial figure whose failure to make alliances with parties who were otherwise bound to oppose him led to a damaging court case in the mid-1930’s (Ries 2002) and the premature termination of his East Greenland mappingbased research program in 1958 (Dawes 2012). Koch was 71 years old and struggling to complete a treatise on the Precambrian geology of Greenland and North America when, in February 1964, he embarked on a sixmonth lecture and study tour sponsored by the American Geological Institute and the Carlsberg Foundation. Some may read this who were present at Koch’s last lecture, in Hamilton Hall, but after nearly fifty years their recollection will have faded while mine has not. Svend Lauge Koch was born in Copenhagen in 1892, the first surviving child of parents already in their thirties, the father a clergyman and author (Dawes 2012). As a teenager, his imagination was fired by the illfated 1906–08 Danmark Expedition (Hansen 2005), during which his ‘uncle’ (actually a more distant relative) Captain J. P. (Johan Peter) Koch and two companions dog-sledded over 2000 km from Danmarkshavn to Cape Bridgman on the north coast of Greenland, previously reached only from the west (Fig. 1). Lauge Koch had his first taste of Greenland in 1913 as an apprentice to Morten P. Porsild, a Danish botanist who spent most of his adult life based at a research station he founded at Qeqertarsuaq (Godhavn), on Disko Island in central West Greenland. As a 21-year-old, Koch’s interests had been split between geology and ornithology, but under the knowledgeable Porsild his assigned task to collect Tertiary plant fossils evolved into a flair for mapping and a desire to investigate the glaciology and geology of the unexplored north coast of Greenland (Dawes 2012). Late in the season, he actually met J. P. Koch and meteorologist-glaciologist Alfred Wegener at Godhavn. They were headed south after crossing the Inland Ice at its widest part, having spent the previous winter on the ice near Danmarkshavn. Before arriving in Greenland, the 33year-old Wegener had submitted the fuller version of his newly-developed theory of continental displacement to Petermann’s Geographical Journal (Jacoby 2001). Koch, who had brought along the published version to read, presented it to the delighted Wegener who did not even know it had been accepted (Dawes 2012). The west side of Greenland, although home to the largest icebergs
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