Jean de Charpentier or Johann von Charpentier (8 December 1786 – 12 December 1855) was a German-Swiss geologist who studied Swiss glaciers. He was born in Freiberg, Saxony, Germany and died in

Bex Bex (; german: Beis; frp, Bés) is a municipality in the canton of Vaud, Switzerland, located in the district of Aigle. It is a few kilometers south of its sister town municipality of Aigle. History Bex is first mentioned in 574 as ''in Bacci ...

Switzerland ). Swiss law does not designate a ''capital'' as such, but the federal parliament and government are installed in Bern, while other federal institutions, such as the federal courts, are in other cities (Bellinzona, Lausanne, Luzern, Neuchâtel ...

Life

After following in his father's footsteps as a mining engineer he excelled in his field while working in the copper mines in the Pyrénées and salt mines in western Switzerland. In 1818 a catastrophic event changed his life focus when an ice-dammed lake in the Val de Bagnes above Martigny broke through its barrier, causing many deaths. Afterwards, he made extensive field studies in the Alps. Using evidence of erratic boulders and moraines and drawing on the works of Goethe, he hypothesized that Swiss glaciers had once been much more extensive. These boulders, characteristic of glaciers, were strewn as if they were brought there by glaciers that no longer existed. Even so, he wasn't sure how glaciers first formed, moved, or how they disappeared. His ideas were later taken up and developed by

Louis Agassiz Jean Louis Rodolphe Agassiz ( ; ) FRS (For) FRSE (May 28, 1807 – December 14, 1873) was a Swiss-born American biologist and geologist who is recognized as a scholar of Earth's natural history. Spending his early life in Switzerland, he rec ...

. upright 1.5, center, Carte Géologique des Pyrénées

Legacy

The glacier of Charpentierbreen in Nathorst Land at

Spitsbergen Spitsbergen (; formerly known as West Spitsbergen; Norwegian: ''Vest Spitsbergen'' or ''Vestspitsbergen'' , also sometimes spelled Spitzbergen) is the largest and the only permanently populated island of the Svalbard archipelago in northern Norw ...

Svalbard Svalbard ( , ), also known as Spitsbergen, or Spitzbergen, is a Norwegian archipelago in the Arctic Ocean. North of mainland Europe, it is about midway between the northern coast of Norway and the North Pole. The islands of the group range ...

is named after him.

Bibliography

* Tobias Krüger, "Auf dem Weg zu einem neuen Verständnis der Klimageschichte: der Alpenraum und die Anfänge der Eiszeitforschung" ''Blätter aus der Walliser Geschichte (Geschichtsforschender Verein Oberwallis)'', XLI, Brig 2009, pp. 123–160. * Tobias Krüger, "Discovering the ice ages : international reception and consequences for a historical understanding of climate", in ''History of science and medicine library''; vol. 37, Leiden 2013, (cloth) ; (electronic bk.) (pp. 148–154, 162–163, 167–168, 177–178, 186–188). * Tobias Krüger, "À l'aube de l'âge de glace. Jean de Charpentier pionnier tragique d'une révolution scientifique", in Patrick Kupper, C. Bernhard Schär (ed.) ''Les Naturalistes. A la découverte de la Suisse et du monde (1800-2015)'', Baden, Hier und Jetzt 2015, , pp. 17–33.

References

* Karl Alfred von Zittel, ( Maria M. Ogilvie Gordon, tr.), ''History of Geology and Palæontology to the End of the Nineteenth Century'' (1901).

External links

* Pictures and texts o
''Essai sur les glaciers et sur le terrain erratique du bassin du Rhône'' by Jean de Charpentier can be found in the database VIATIMAGES

{{DEFAULTSORT:Charpentier, Jean De 1786 births 1855 deaths 19th-century German geologists 19th-century Swiss geologists

Life

Legacy

See also

Bibliography

References

External links