Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences
What organization or association or team did Eduard Suess join in 1895?
Eduard Suess Eduard Suess ( ; 20 August 1831 ~ 26 April 1914 ) was an Austrian geologist and an expert on the geography of the Alps . He is responsible for hypothesising two major former geographical features , the supercontinent Gondwana ( proposed in 1861 ) and the Tethys Ocean . Biography . Eduard Suess was born on 20 August 1831 in London , England , the oldest son of Adolph Heinrich Suess , a Lutheran Saxon merchant , and mother Eleonore Friederike Zdekauer . Adolph Heinrich Suess was born on 11 March 1797 in Saxony , Holy Roman Empire and died on 24 May 1862 in Vienna , Austrian Empire , German confederation ; Eleonore Friederike Zdekauer was born in Prague , nowadays part of the Czech Republic , which once belonged to the Holy Roman Empire and the Austrian Empire . When Eduard Suess was three , his family relocated to Prague , and then to Vienna when he was 14 . He became interested in geology at a young age . While working as an assistant at the Hofmuseum in Vienna , he published his first paper—on the geology of Carlsbad ( in present-day Czech Republic ) —when he was 19 . In 1855 , Suess married Hermine Strauss , the daughter of a prominent physician from Prague . Their marriage produced five sons and one daughter . In 1856 , he was appointed professor of paleontology at the University of Vienna , and in 1861 was appointed professor of geology . He gradually developed views on the connection between Africa and Europe . Eventually , he concluded that the Alps to the north were once at the bottom of an ocean , of which the Mediterranean was a remnant . Suess was not correct in his analysis , which was predicated upon the notion of contractionism—the idea that the Earth is cooling down and , therefore , contracting . Nevertheless , he is credited with postulating the earlier existence of the Tethys Ocean , which he named in 1893 . He claimed in 1885 that land bridges had connected South America , Africa , India , Australia , and Antarctica . He named this ancient broken continent Gondwanaland . Suess published a comprehensive synthesis of his ideas between 1885 and 1901 titled Das Antlitz der Erde ( The Face of the Earth ) , which was a popular textbook for many years . In volume two of this massive three-volume work , Suess set out his belief that across geologic time , the rise and fall of sea levels were mappable across the earth—that is , that the periods of ocean transgression and regression were correlateable from one continent to another . His theory was based upon glossopteris fern fossils occurring in South America , Africa , and India . His explanation was that the three lands were once connected in a supercontinent , which he named Gondwanaland . Again , this is not quite correct : Suess believed that the oceans flooded the spaces currently between those lands . In his work Die Entstehung der Alpen , Suess also introduced the concept of the biosphere , which was later extended by Vladimir I . Vernadsky in 1926 . Suess wrote : He was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 1886 and the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in 1895 . He received the Wollaston Medal of the Geological Society of London in 1896 and he won the Copley Medal of the Royal Society in 1903 . Suess died on 26 April 1914 in Vienna . He is buried in the town of Marz in Burgenland , Austria . Legacy . Suess is considered one of the early practitioners of ecology . Suess Land in Greenland , the lunar crater Suess , as well as the crater Suess on Mars , are named after him . Franz Eduard Suess . His son , Franz Eduard Suess ( 1867–1941 ) , was superintendent and geologist at the Imperial Geological Institute in Vienna , who studied moldavites and coined the term tektite . The asteroid 12002 Suess , discovered by Czech astronomers Petr Pravec and Lenka Kotková in 1996 , was named in his honor . Works . - Über die Brachiopoden der Kössener Schichten ( 1854 ) - Der Boden der Stadt Wien ( 1862 ) - Die Entstehung der Alpen ( 1875 ) - Das Antlitz der Erde in three volumes ( 1885–1909 ) - La face de la terre , ( 1897–1918 ) , translation de lallemand par Emmanuel de Margerie , préface par Marcel Bertrand - The Face of the Earth , trans . of Das Antlitz der Erde in 5 vols . ( 1904–1924 ) - Erinnerungen ( 1916 ) External links . - Plate Tectonics