French volcanologist Haroun Tazieff walks on Sicily's Mount Etna during a trip arranged by Petit Prince, a French organization that grants the wishes of ill children.
Haroun Tazieff was a Polish-born French volcanologist whose fascination with volcanoes and knowledge of them, often obtained under extremely harrowing conditions, were enthusiastically shared by the French public through books and, especially, in films on television. He was considered one of the six most popular personalities in France.
Background
Ethnicity:
Haroun's father, Sabir, was of Tatar descent and his mother, Zenita, was a Polish Jewish.
Haroun Tazieff was born on May 11, 1914 in Warsaw, then part of Tsarist Russia, to a Tatar father, Sabir, a medical doctor, born in Samarkand, and a Jewish mother, Zenita, née Klupt, born in Dvinsk, who was a chemist and doctor in political sciences. His father died at the front at the start of the First World War. With his mother, he emigrated to Belgium in late 1920 where he resided stateless, before receiving Belgian nationality in 1936. Haroun was naturalized French in 1971, automatically losing Belgian nationality.
Education
Haroun received a degree in agronomy in Gembloux in 1938 and another degree in geology at the University of Liège in 1944.
Tazieff worked in the French Alps, fought with the French resistance during World War II, and worked in the Sermikat Tin Mines in the Belgian Congo (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo) from 1945 to 1947. After participating in a geological survey in the Belgian Congo in the late 1940s, he taught mining geology at the University of Brussels, worked with the International Laboratory for Volcanologic Research, and participated in the French National Committee on Geodesy and Geophysics.
During his lifetime Haroun made many studies of volcanoes in various places on the planet: Etna, Stromboli, Erebus, Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes in Alaska, Soufriere in Guadeloupe, Mont Pele in Martinique. He was one of the first to film them close up. The film Dates with the Devil was his attempt to show people more realistically what a volcano was like.
From 1972 to 1981 Haroun served as director of the National Center for Scientific Research in France, and in 1984 he was named Secretary of State for the Prevention of Natural and Technological Disasters by French Prime Minister Laurent Fabius. Tazieff liked to call the latter post "minister for mini-catastrophes." He served as mayor of Mirmande from 1977 to 1989 and began a stint as a town councilor in Grenoble in 1989 and another as a councilor in Rhône-Alpes in 1992. From 1988 to 1995 Haroun Tazieff was President of the Higher Commission on Volcanic Hazards and Risk.
Among his books were Craters of Fire, Caves of Adventure, Volcanoes, When the Earth Trembles, The Making of the Earth: Volcanoes and Continental Drift, Forecasting Volcanic Events, Sur l'Etna, Les Defis et la Chance: Ma Vie (an autobiography in two volumes), and Nyiragongo: The Forbidden Volcano.
Haroun Tazieff was a famous volcanologist, geologist and cinematographer of volcanic eruptions and lava flows. He became famous in France after publishing the book "Le Gouffre de la Pierre Saint-Martin." Tazieff was also known as the member of the French Resistance and the founder of the International Institute of Volcanology in Sicily.
Haroun was a recipient of numerous awards, among which are Patron's Medal, Mungo Park Medal and Jean Walter Prize.
An environmentalist, Tazieff differed with others in some areas. He dismissed the notion of global warming as well as the idea that chlorofluorocarbons were destroying the ozone layer.
Membership
Haroun Tazieff was a member of the Philomatic Society.
Interests
Sport & Clubs
rugby, mountaineering
Connections
Haroun Tazieff married Pauline de Ways-Ruart d'Elzius on March 30, 1953. She died on October 19, 1953. Then Haroun married France Depierre on February 24, 1958.
