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.

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.

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.