Louis Agassiz lived in a hut on a glacier to prove ice ages happened
In 1837 a Swiss naturalist was expected to lecture about fossil fish. Instead Louis Agassiz stunned his audience by arguing that giant ice sheets had once smothered the Northern Hemisphere. To back it up, he moved into a hut built on an Alpine glacier and watched the ice creep.
Agassiz was born on May 28, 1807, in the hamlet of Motier in the Swiss canton of Fribourg, the son of a Protestant pastor from a long clerical line. He earned a doctorate at Erlangen in 1829 and a medical degree in Munich the next year, then went to Paris, where Georges Cuvier steered him toward zoology and Alexander von Humboldt toward geology and his purse. Before he had even finished studying, he was chosen to describe the Brazilian freshwater fish gathered by a German expedition, publishing the results in 1829.
Fish made his name. From a modest chair at Neuchatel, taken in 1832 at about 400 dollars a year, he produced five richly illustrated volumes on fossil fish between 1833 and 1843, with many plates drawn by his wife, Cecile Braun. Because fossils usually preserve teeth, scales and fins rather than soft parts, he sorted fish into four groups by their scales, a scheme later replaced. The Geological Society of London gave him its Wollaston Medal in 1836.
The glacier turn came during an 1836 holiday at Bex, where Jean de Charpentier and Ignaz Venetz convinced him that boulders strewn across the Jura had been carried by ice. He pushed their idea much further, imagining one vast sheet covering Switzerland. His 1840 Studies on Glaciers explained moraines, scratched bedrock and rounded rocks, and that year he and William Buckland found signs of former glaciers across Scotland.
In 1847 Agassiz settled in the United States, taught zoology and geology at Harvard, ran its Lawrence Scientific School and founded its Museum of Comparative Zoology, while championing public science and education for women. His legacy is shadowed by his belief that human groups had separate origins, a view criticised as lending support to scientific racism. He died on December 14, 1873.
Source: Louis Agassiz
