Helmut Vidal

Helmut Vidal (born January 21, 1919 in Munich- Neuhausen; † November 30, 2002 ) was a German geologist.

Vidal, the son of a senior engineer, was after high school at Wittelsbacher Gymnasium in Munich (1938) in the Reich Labor Service and in 1939 a soldier in the Wehrmacht during the attack on Poland , where he caught yellow fever and was unfit for military service. The rest of the Second World War he was with the Abwehr in Berlin. After the war he attended the language school in Munich with a diploma in English in 1946 and then studied geology at the University of Munich with a diploma in 1951. There he specialized in geophysics and also worked for half a year at the Office for Soil Research in Hanover (1953) as Geophysicist. In 1953 he received his doctorate in Munich with a dissertation on the tectonics of the northwestern Wetterstein Mountains and its northern foreland. Then he was in the Bavarian State Institute for Moor Management and Land Culture , whose director he became in 1963. During this time he dealt particularly with moors, soil science and soil sampling. In 1955/56 he took part in a six-month expedition to Pakistan under Richard Dehm . From 1966 until his retirement in 1984 he headed the Bavarian State Geological Office . At the end of his term of office he was able to inaugurate a new building for the state office.

He was particularly involved in continental deep boreholes, first in two deep boreholes to clarify the question of the thrust of the northern limestone Alps on the foreland molasse (deep borehole Vorderriß 1977 with 6468 m, Hindelang 1984 with 5653 m). He was in charge of the continental deep drilling program (KTB), which led to the deep drilling in Windischeschenbach in the Upper Palatinate (from 1987, up to 9101 m). He also carried out a deep borehole of 1206 m in the Nördlinger Ries (from 1973), which brought new knowledge about its structure. Internationally, he was chairman of the Continental Drilling coordination committee .

In 1979 he received the Cross of Merit on Ribbon and in 1984 the first class of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany . From 1976 he was honorary professor at the University of Munich. In 1983 he became an honorary member of the German Geological Society .

literature

• Obituary in Geologica Bavarica, Volume 108, 2003, pp. 225-237, pdf