Eduard Suess was born on 20 August 1831 in London, England, the oldest son of Adolph Heinrich Suess, a
Lutheran Saxon wool merchant, and mother Eleonore Friederike Zdekauer. Adolph Heinrich Suess was born on 11 March 1797 in Saxony and died on 24 May 1862 in Vienna, he had studied theology before moving to business; Eleonore Friederike Zdekauer was born in Prague, now part of the
Czech Republic, which once belonged to the
Holy Roman Empire and the
Austrian Empire. The Zdekauers were a wealthy Jewish origin banking family in Prague who had converted to Lutheranism. In 1855, Suess married Hermine Strauss (1835-1898), the daughter of a prominent physician from Prague and also a niece of Moritz Hörnes. Their marriage produced five sons and one daughter. He made use of the material in the mineral cabinet as well as excursions for his teachings. 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. In his book
Die Entsehung der Alpen (The Origin of the Alps, 1875) he pointed out that mountains were produced not by upward flow of magma but by lateral compression. He claimed in 1885 that land bridges had connected South America, Africa, India, Australia, and Antarctica, creating a supercontinent which he named
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. The German edition was published in five volumes numbered as 1A, 1B, 2, 3-1, 3-2 and an index. 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 and thus global phenomena. 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. Suess believed that the oceans flooded the spaces currently between those lands. He used the word eustasy and eustatic sea-level changes or “eustatic movements” (“eustatische Bewegungen”) in 1888 which was translated into English in 1906. He considered the sinking of ocean basis for negative eustasis and the filling by sediments as cause for positive eustasis. He did not consider the idea that ice may have compressed the land below but noticed marine shorelines high above Norwegian fjords and suggested that the sea level may have been higher in the ice age. In his time it was also ascribed to the gravitational pull of the ice masses on the poles. Suess mentioned ideas on 25,900 year climate cycles arising from an altered orbit around the sun and resulting changes in solar radiation. Suess was also a member of the Austrian parliament as a representative of the liberal party. He stayed in the seat for 30 years until his retirement in 1896. As a parliamentarian he examined the policy of gold reserves and noted in his book
Die Zukunft des Goldes (1877, [The future of gold]) that a scarcity of gold and an abundance of silver can be expected based on geology and that the gold standard might not work for all nations.In 1892 he wrote
Die Zukunft des Silbers which was translated into English by the United States Senate in 1893. By this time his predictions on gold were holding but he pointed out that the government should stock a moderate amount of gold but not declare a gold standard or to fix an exchange ratio between the silver florin and gold coins. 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 ==