Jean Vogt 1929-2005. His Life as a Seismologist, Geologist, Geographer, and Historian

Abstract

Jean Vogt was born in 1929 in Strasbourg (France), where he attended primary and secondary school. At the University of Strasbourg, he graduated in Geography, and majored in Geomorphology. His professor was the geographer Jean Tricart, who taught him the importance of both geological field work and archive investigation.

In 1955 he joined the French West-Africa Geological Service and later the French Bureau for Geology and Mines (BRGM). Along the following 20 years he lived as a “geological” globetrotter in a number of countries, dispensing his time between the field and the archives. In these years, he was concerned mainly with mining geology, geomorphology, superficial deposits, and landslides.

This unique experience led him in 1975 to the responsibility of the “Seismo-Tectonic Project”, the BRGM project in relation with the French nuclear power programme. From 1975 to 1984, he gave a substantial impulse to the study of French historical earthquakes, and since then he visited almost every public archive in France, and several major archives and libraries in Europe and abroad. He took care at the same time of the follow-up of macroseismic studies of present-day earthquakes. After he retired in 1984, he continued on a personal basis his investigations of historical earthquakes, in Europe, the Middle East, North Africa, and the Caribbean area.

Alongside and for about 50 years, Jean Vogt investigated uninterruptedly the agrarian history of Northeastern France and Southwestern Germany. He published in scientific journals and in local learned societies bulletins more than 500 notes and articles devoted to a variety of subjects, such as soil erosion, agriculture, cattle trade, and social conflicts.

Jean Vogt died on 5 June 2005 in Strasbourg. His scientific legacy consists of a wealth of published papers, manuscripts, documentation related to history and seismology, awaiting to be further exploited, as he would have done.