Jean de Charpentier

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Jean de Charpentier

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, Switzerland.

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,^[1] 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,^[2] 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.

See also: ice age

References

↑ The flood is described in Jean M. Grove, Little Ice Ages, Ancient and Modern (as The Little Ice Age 1988) rev. ed. 2004:161.
↑ Cameron, Dorothy (1964). Early discoverers XXII, Goethe-Discoverer of the ice age. Journal of glaciology.

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

External links

Authority control	WorldCat VIAF: 95170138 LCCN: nr98020404 ISNI: 0000 0001 2213 6345 GND: 10201227X

Persondata
Name	Charpentier, Jean de
Alternative names
Short description	German-Swiss geologist
Date of birth	8 December 1786
Place of birth
Date of death	12 December 1855
Place of death

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