Eduard Suess

Eduard Suess was an Austrian geologist known for his broad theoretical syntheses of Earth's structure and history. In 1861, and more fully in 1885, Suess proposed that the southern continents of South America, Africa, India and Australia had once been connected as part of a single former landmass, which he named Gondwana-Land after matching fossil evidence such as the seed fern Glossopteris found across these now-separated continents. In 1893 Suess named the Tethys Ocean, an ancient sea he argued had once occupied the region now covered by the Alps and the Mediterranean Sea. Suess introduced the concept of eustasy in 1888, proposing that changes in sea level recorded in rock sequences on different continents reflected global rather than only local processes, and in his 1875 book Die Entstehung der Alpen he coined the term biosphere for the zone of life on Earth's surface, a concept later greatly expanded by Vladimir Vernadsky. Suess set out his integrated view of Earth's structure and history in the five-volume work Das Antlitz der Erde, published between 1885 and 1901, and was awarded both the Wollaston Medal in 1896 and the Copley Medal in 1903.