Georg Adolf Otto Wüst (15 June 1890 - 8 November 1977) 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.
Life
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.Hans Ulrich Roll: Georg Wüst, 1890–1977. In: DGM-Mitteilungen. Deutsche Gesellschaft für Meeresforschung, Hamburg 1987, pp. 25-28.Gerhard Kortum: "Wüst, Georg" In: Koertge, N. (ed.): New Dictionary of Scientific Biography (= 25). Charles Scribner's Sons, New York 2013, , pp. 373-376. His most important teachers were Albrecht Penck and in particular Alfred Merz.Theodor Stocks: "Georg Wüst und seine Stellung in der neueren Ozeanographie." In: Petermanns Geographische Mitteilungen 1960, pp. 292-295 (Georg Wüst and his standing in recent oceanography). 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.Georg Wüst: "Die Verdunstung auf dem Meere" In: Veröffentlichungen des Instituts für Meereskunde (= Neue Folge Reihe A Heft 6). Berlin 1920, p. 1-95. (The evaporation on the ocean) 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.Fritz Spiess: Die Meteorfahrt. Forschungen und Erlebnisse der Deutschen Atlantischen Expedition. Dietrich Reimers, Berlin 1928, pp. 1-375 (English The Stratosphere of the Atlantic Ocean übersetzt vom Al-Ahram Center for Scientific Translations, Translation edited by William J. Emery, Amerind Publishing Co. Pvt. Ltd., New Delhi, 1978, 1-112, 1 - 429 (The Meteor Expedition. Scientific Results of the German Atlantic Expedition, 1925-1927)
After the expedition Wüst predominantly worked on the evaluation of the obtained data sets at the Berlin institute. He obtained the permission to teach (Habilitation) at the Friedrich-Wilhelm-University in Berlin in 1929 with a thesis on the Florida Current and was appointed Professor in 1936. In the meantime he had become a well-esteemed member of the international marine science community. However, all these connections broke down with the approach of World War II. Wüst had become a member of the NSDAP and served as a member of the nautical-scientific staff at the Supreme Command of the Navy during the war. At the same time, however, he continued teaching at the Friedrich-Wilhelm-University in Berlin.
The Institute and Museum of Marine Sciences in Berlin was destroyed by bombing in 1944 and was never rebuilt after the end of World War II.Hans-Jürgen Brosin: Zur Geschichte der Meeresforschung in der DDR. In: Meereswissenschaftliche Berichte, 17. Warnemünde 1996, pp. 1-212 (On the history of marine research in the German Democratic Republic).
In early 1946 Wüst was offered the job of rebuilding marine research in Kiel, Germany. The Institute of Marine Science (German: Institut für Meereskunde Kiel) of the University of Kiel (German: Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel, CAU) had also lost many members of its staff and its building by a bombing raid. Wüst became Professor of Oceanography and Maritime Meteorology at Kiel University and Director of the Institute of Marine Science.Walter Zenk, Gerold Siedler, Peter C. Wille, Gerd Wegner, Jörn Thiede, Volker Storch, Peter Speth, Eberhard Ruprecht, Manfred Ehrhardt, Bernt Zeitzschel: "Early oceanography and the development of physical and chemical marine sciences in Kiel after World War II." In: "Deutsches Schiffahrtsarchiv, Wissenschaftliches Jahrbuch des Deutschen Schiffahrtsmuseums", Bremerhaven, 39, 2018, (given date 2016, actually published 2018), , 38-72.Thiede, J., W.W. Hay, M. Sarnthein, P. Schäfer, G. Siedler, P. Stoffers, V. Storch, E. Suess, R. von Huene, P.C. Wille, B. Zeitzschel, W. Zenk: "From a modest start to a flourishing marine research environment: The institutional development of marine geosciences in Kiel/ Germany after World War II." In: "Deutsches Schiffahrtsarchiv, Wissenschaftliches Jahrbuch des Deutschen Schiffahrtsmuseums", Bremerhaven, 39, 2018, (given date 2016, actually published 2018), SSN 0343-3668, , 97-144. Website of SSOAR. Access on September 25, 2018. Website of SSOAR. Access on September 25, 2018. He succeeded in bringing back some of the earlier staff, was provided with an old villa as an institute building, obtained the research cutter Südfall and restarted marine science teaching.Georg Wüst et al.: Das Institut für Meereskunde der Universität nach seinem Wiederaufbau. In: Kieler Meeresforschungen. Kiel 1956 (= 12). pp. 127-153 (The institute of marine sciences of the university after its rebuilding).Hartwig Weidemann: Georg Wüst und das Kieler Institut für Meereskunde (zum 100. Geburtstag am 15. 6. 1990). In: DGM-Mitteilungen. Deutsche Gesellschaft für Meeresforschung, Hamburg 1990, pp. 10-11 (Georg Wüst and the institute of marine sciences in Kiel (to his 100th birthday on 15 June 1990). The main focus of the institute in Kiel had been marine biology in the shallow seas of the Baltic and the North Sea before, with some history of hydrography, marine chemistry and marine geology. Wüst brought his experience in deep-sea research to bear in the scientific orientation of the Kiel institute. He and ultimately his successor from 1959, Günter Dietrich, an earlier collaborator in the Berlin institute, changed the earlier focus towards deep ocean work, in particular in physical oceanography and marine chemistry. With this scientific orientation and the related teaching the Kiel institute took over the legacy of the Berlin institute. In particular the teaching required a close association with Kiel University. From 1950 to 1952 Wüst served as Dean of the Faculty of Philosophy which also enclosed Mathematics and Science at that time.
After his retirement at Kiel University in 1959, Wüst followed an invitation to be a visiting professor at the Lamont–Doherty Earth Observatory in Columbia-University, New York, USA. Here, his main focus was the circulation in the Caribbean Sea.Arnold L. Gordon: Editor's Preface. In: Arnold L. Gordon (Editor): Studies in Physical Oceanography (= 1.). Gordon and Breach Science).Wolfgang Schott: Early German Oceanographic Institutions, Expeditions and Oceanographers In: Fourth International Congress on the History of Oceanography. Deutsches Hydrographisches Institut, Hamburg 1987, pp. 42-43. During this stay in the USA, Wüst also accepted an invitation in 1962 to the Walker-Ames-Chair of the University of Washington in Seattle. After his return to Germany in 1965 he was a visiting professor at the Institute of Meteorology of the University of Bonn (German: Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn) in Germany until 1967.
Georg Wüst was married to Martha Wüst from 1921 until she died in 1941. They had two children. From 1943 he was remarried to Maria Wüst.
Scientific achievements
Wüst stood out by the ability of gaining a profound understanding of ocean processes from a systematic description and analysis of oceanic data sets, in particular the property exchange, the origin of water masses and their large-scale motions and transports. His main research themes were: evaporation and precipitation and the water budget of the ocean, the large-scale distribution and circulation of deep water masses in the Atlantic and other oceans, the motions of Gulf Stream and Kuroshio, the origin of polar bottom waters and the circulation in the Mediterranean Sea. In his later years there followed treatises on the history of deep-sea research. Dietrich (1972)Günter Dietrich: Georg Wüst's Scientific Work. Dedication to His Eightieth Birthday. In: Arnold L. Gordon (Editor): Studies in Physical Oceanography (= 1.). Gordon and Breach Science Publishers, New York 1972, pp. xi-xx. presented a complete list of Wüst's 112 publications in his contribution to the book which was published as a tribute to Wüst's 80th birthday.
For his doctoral thesis Wüst performed systematic observations of evaporation on several vessels, developed specific analysis methods and discussed distribution patterns of evaporation in the world oceans. He returned to the related topics of evaporation, precipitation and salinity at the ocean-atmosphere interface and their relevance for the water budget at numerous times through the following decades.Georg Wüst: Verdunstung und Niederschlag auf der Erde. In: Zeitschrift der Gesellschaft für Erdkunde. 1922, pp. 33-43 (Evaporation and precipitation on the earth).Georg Wüst: Temperatur- und Dampfdruckgefälle in den untersten Metern über der Meeresoberfläche. In: Meteorologische Zeitschrift. (= 54). Braunschweig 1937, pp. 4-9 (The gradient of temperature and vapor pressure in the lowest meters above the sea surface).Georg Wüst: Wasserdampf und Niederschlag auf dem Meere als Glieder des Wasserkreislaufs (unter besonderer Berücksichtigung von Ergebnissen der "Meteor"-Expedition und neuerer Arbeiten). In: Deutsche Hydrographische Zeitschrift. Hamburg 1950, pp. 111-127 (Water vapour and precipitation on the ocean as links of the water cycle (with particular consideration of results from the "Meteor" expedition and recent work)).Georg Wüst: Gesetzmäßige Wechselbeziehungen zwischen Ozean und Atmosphäre in der zonalen Verteilung von Oberflächensalzgehalt, Verdunstung und Niederschlag. In: Archiv für Meteorologie und Bioklimatologie. (= A Nr.7). Wien 1954, pp. 305-328 (Valid interrelationships between ocean and atmosphere regarding the zonal distribution of surface salinity, evaporation and precipitation).