Haroun Tazieff

Haroun Tazieff (Warsaw, 11 May 1914 – Paris, 2 February 1998) was a Tatar, Belgian and French volcanologist and geologist. He was a famous cinematographer of volcanic eruptions and lava flows, and the author of several books on volcanoes. He was also a government adviser and French cabinet minister. He also served in the Belgian resistance during world war 2.

His parents met and married in 1906 while they were both students in Brussels. They later returned to Warsaw, Russian Partition, where their first son, Salvator, died at two months and where Haroun was born. His father, Sabir, was a Muslim medical doctor, of Tatar descent and his mother, Zenita Iliyasovna Klupta, was a Tatar[dubious – discuss] chemist and doctor of natural science and holder of a bachelor's degree in political science. His father was conscripted into the Russian Army and died during the First world war, a fact that did not reach the family until 1919. In 1917 Haroun emigrated to Brussels with his widowed mother.

Haroun received a degree in agronomy in Gembloux in 1938, and another degree in geology at the University of Liège in 1944. He was later a Secretary of state in France, in charge of protection against major risks.

Haroun Tazieff participated in the first detailed exploration of the "Saint-Martin" La Verna cave system in the French Pyrenees. In 1952, while he was filming Marcel Loubens' ascent of the Pierre-Saint-Martin rock face, the cable of the hoist broke and Loubens fell over 80 meters. Loubens died 36 hours later but his body could only be recovered from the cave in 1954.

He became famous in France after publishing a book entitled, "Le Gouffre de la Pierre Saint-Martin" in 1952.

He directed the documentary movie Le volcan interdit (1966) about the Nyiragongo Mountain in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which he was the first to climb in 1948.

The National Geographic film, The Violent Earth, was based on Tazieff's expeditions to the volcanoes Mount Etna on Sicily in 1971 and Mount Nyiragongo in 1972. In these expeditions he attempted, unsuccessfully, to descend into the active lava lake in order to collect samples — something he had managed to achieve on a previous expedition in 1959.

Tazieff died in 1998 and was buried in the Passy Cemetery in Paris.

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