Born: May 11, 1914, Warsaw, Russian partition of Poland (presently Poland)
Died: February 6, 1998, Paris, France
Early days. His father, Sabir Aniatoullovitch Taziev, was a Tartar immigrant doctor, and Muslim, and his mother, Zinaida Klupta a Latvian born Polish-Russian chemist. After the death of his father early during World War I, his mother took him to Belgium where he studied and graduated as agronomist from Gembloux in 1938 and as geologist at the University of Liege in 1944. After having served in Belgian army he participated in the Resistance during WWII.
Professional career. In 1945 he started working as a geologist in the tin mines of Katanga (Belgian Congo) followed by employment in the geological service of Belgian Congo. It was the 1948 eruption of the volcano Kituro, which he studied, that evolved in a lifelong passion for the volcanoes. Tazieff was a member of the exploration team of Gouffre Pierre-Saint-Martin in the Pyrenees at the border between France and Spain which is the deepest cave of the World (the caves' first perpendicular drop beyond the opening goes 1,000 feet down). He made a documentary of the cave and of the search for the underground water stream, which was later used by a hydroelectric power station. In 1953 he moved to Paris where he got an appointment as the director of volcanology laboratory at the Institute of Physics of the Globe. He took part in a series of volcanological expeditions: Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes in Alaska, Afar, Nyragongo, Erta Ale, Erebus, Etna, Faial, and Soufriere in Guadeloupe. His skill and courage allowed him to measure various properties of eruption gases never obtained before. Appointed to the University of Brussels he organized in 1957 the Centre National de Volcanologie and in 1961 participated in organizing the International Institute of Volcanological Research inCatania, Sicily. At the beginning of the 1960s he traveled with Jacques Cousteau. Since 1963 Tazieff and his coworkers invented devices specifically for the analysis of the volcanoes. In 1972 he joined CNRS and led the volcanological laboratory at the Centre of Weak Radioactivities at Gif-sur-Yvette that specialized in studying the eruptive gazes. From 1984 till 1986 he had been a "secretaire d'Etat" in France, in charge of prevention of major risks. From 1988 till 1995 he presided over the Superior Committee for Evaluation of Volcanic Risks (CSERV). Tazieff was married to France Tazieff.
Science popularization He authored and coauthored several books like 1951 Cratères en feu, 1952 Le Gouffre de la Pierre Saint-Martin or 1953 Caves of Adnenture . He also wrote and produced numerous documentaries on volcanoes: Les rendez-vous du diable, 1958; The Forbidden Volcano, 1966 for which he was nominated for an Oscar and others. On his passing in 1998, Tazieff was interred in Cimetière de Passy in the Parisian quarter of Passy.
Sources:
This article uses, among others, material from the Wikipedia article "Haroun Tazieff" licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. :
Wikipedia
and also
C’est du belge! (in French)
Books and films by Tazieff (in French)
LAVE (in French)
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