Vincent Courtillot

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Vincent Courtillot (born March 6, 1948 in Neuilly-sur-Seine ) is a French geophysicist. He is known as a proponent of the thesis that various mass extinctions in the history of the earth can be traced back to volcanism.

Life

Courtillot studied at the Ecole des Mines in Paris (graduating as a mining engineer, Ingénieur civil des Mines , 1971), at Stanford University (master's degree in geophysics in 1972) and at the University of Paris , where he received his doctorate in 1974 (Doctorat de 3ème cycle, University of Paris VI) and 1977 (Doctorat d´Etat, University of Paris VII) wrote his two doctoral theses. He researched and taught at Stanford (1974 as visiting scholar, 1980 as visiting professor), at Caltech (1994 as Fairchild Scholar , 2001 as Moore Fellow), the University of California, Santa Barbara (visiting professor 1986/97), at the Institut de physique du globe de Paris (1983 to 1989 as physicist 1st class and 1989 to 1994 as Physicien de classe exceptionelle ) and 1978 to 1983 as Maitre de Conference and from 1994 as professor at the University of Paris VII (Denis Diderot). From 1995 to 1998 he was director of the Ecole doctorale des Sciences de la Terre (Graduate School for Geosciences) of the IGPG and the University of Paris VII. In 1996 he was visiting professor at the University of Minnesota . From 1996 to 1998 and 2004 to January 2011 he was director of the Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris (IPGP).

From 1989 to 1993 he was responsible for university research at the Ministry of Education (Directeur de la Recherche et des Etudes Doctorales) and from 1998 to 2001 for research (Directeur de Recherche) under the Minister of Education Claude Allègre .

He was a consultant for the popular science journal La Recherche , European editor of Geophysical Research Letters from 1994 to 1996 and editor of Earth and Planetary Science Letters from 2003 to 2005.

Memberships and honors

He received the Prix Dolomieu in 2001 and the Prix Gay of the French Academy of Sciences in 1981, is in command of the Palmes Academiques (1997), received the silver medal of the CNRS (1993) and he is Knight of the Legion of Honor (1994) and of the Ordre national du Mérite ( 1990, 1997). He is a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union, whose first Bullard Lecturer he was in 2002. From 1996 to 2010 he was Professor ( Professeur senior ) at the Institut Universitaire de France . In 2012 he received the Arthur Holmes Medal of the European Geosciences Union . He is a member of the Academia Europaea and the Chinese Academy of Sciences .

Courtillot was President of the European Union of Geosciences and has been a member of the Académie des Sciences since 2003 . From 2002 to 2010 he was founding president of the Conseil Scientifique of the city of Paris.

plant

Courtillot studied paleomagnetism . In 1980 he founded the paleomagnetic laboratory at the IPGP with Jean-Pierre Pozzi. He discovered paleomagnetic clues in the Afar Triangle in Djibouti to the division of the African continent along the Great Rift Valley . In 1978 he found an (worldwide detectable) acceleration (abrupt change in the second time derivative) in the secular temporal change of the earth's magnetic field ( jerk ) around 1969. Such jerks were also recorded earlier (and after) and are particularly evident in the eastern component of the Field in Europe and are indications of processes at the boundary between the Earth's core and mantle, as well as correlations with the variation in the length of day (LOD) (Courtillot et al.).

In the early 1980s he was involved in the geological (paleomagnetic) exploration of Tibet and investigated the plate tectonic development of China.

He became known as a proponent of the theory that important mass extinctions in Earth's history were triggered by volcanic events. In the case of the mass extinction on the Permian Triassic border , he blamed the formation of the Siberian trap , in the case of the Cretaceous-Tertiary border the Deccan traps and is thus in a certain way in opposition to the hypothesis of extinction by meteorite impact by Luis Walter Alvarez and Walter Alvarez . He also examined the influence of flood volcanism on further mass extinctions and, more recently, the climatic effects of the Laki fissure eruption in 1783/84 in Iceland.

In France he is considered a climate skeptic who considers man-made global warming to be a dogma that makes scientific debates more difficult. He also criticizes the preponderance of numerical modeling and the neglect of the observation component, both in the falsification of the models and in questions such as the specification of error limits. In this context, he and his colleagues re-analyzed the mean temperature development in Europe and North America after he had not received access to the original data from the leading scientist in the IPCC report, Philip D. Jones , and came to different results. According to Courtillot, the trend was different in North America and Europe and can be described as linear or constant trends, interrupted by jumps, characteristic of non-linear behavior, which correlate little with the IPCC predictions of an influence of the increase in carbon dioxide from numerical models. His involvement sparked a scientific controversy in France. Courtillot emphasizes (and studies) the main influence of the sun on the earth's climate and investigates the influence of the earth's magnetic field on the climate.

Fonts

  • The dying of the dinosaurs. Geological catastrophes , Spektrum Akademischer Verlag 1999 (French original La vie en catastrophes , Fayard 1995)
  • Evolutionary Catastrophes. The Science of Mass Extinction , Cambridge University Press 1999 (revised edition of La vie en catastrophes )
  • Nouveau voyage au center de la Terre , Éditions Odile Jacob, 2009
  • with Vink How continents break up ; Scientific American, July 1983 (Departure of the African continent in the Afar Depression)
  • A volcanic eruption , Scientific American, October 1990 (Dekkan Traps)
  • with Jean Besse, Didier Vandamme, Raymond Montigny, Jean-Jacques Jaeger, Henri Cappetta Deccan flood basalts at the Cretaceous / Tertiary boundary? , Earth and Planetary Science Letters, Volume 80, 1986, pp. 361-374
  • with Mark A. Richards, Robert A. Duncan Flood Basalts and Hot-Spot Tracks: Plume Heads and Tails , Science, Volume 246, 1989, pp. 103-107
  • Mass extinctions in the last 300 million years: One impact and seven flood basalts? , Israel Journal of Earth Sciences, Vol. 43, 1994, pp. 255-266.
  • with J. Besse Magnetic field reversals, polar wander, and core-mantle coupling , Science, Volume 237, 1987, pp. 1140-1147
  • with Anne Davaille, J. Besse, Joann Stock, Three distinct types of hotspots in the Earth's mantle , Earth Planet. Sci. Lett, Volume 205, 2003, pp. 295-308
  • with P. Renne On the ages of flood basalt events , Comptes Rendus Geosciences, Volume 335, 2003, pp. 113-140
  • with J. Besse Revised and synthetic apparent polar wander paths of the African, Eurasian, North American and Indian plates, and true polar wander since 200 Ma , J. Geophys. Res., Vol. 96, 1991, pp. 4029-4050
  • True Polar Wander in Gubbins u. a. (Editor) Encyclopedia of Geomagnetism and Paleomagnetism , Springer 2007
  • with Le Mouel A short history of geomagnetism and paleomagnetism , Reviews of Geophysics, Volume 45, 2007

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ V. Courtillot, A. Galdeano, JL Le Mouel, Propagation of an accreting plate boundary: discussion of a new aeromagnetic survey of the Republic of Djibouti , Earth Planet. Sci. Lett., 47, 144-160 (1980)
  2. ↑ Secular describes changes on a time scale of 10 years or more, which are usually attributed to internal processes in the earth
  3. ↑ V. Courtillot, J. Ducruix, JL Le Mouel, Sur une accélération récente de la variation you séculaire champ magnétique terrestre , CRAcad.Sci.Paris, D 287, 1095-1098 (1978). Review article Courtillot, Le Mouel Time variations of the earth's magnetic field: from daily to secular , Ann. Rev. of Earth and Planetary Science, Volume 16, 1988, p. 389
  4. ↑ For example 1925, 1978, 1991, 1999 and probably around 1901 and 1913. The duration of the jerks is less than two years. Susan MacMillan Geomagnetic Jerks in Gubbins u. a. Encyclopedia of Geomagnetism and Paleomagnetism , 2007
  5. ^ Courtillot, Besse Mesozoic and cenozoic evolution of the North and South China blocks , Nature, Volume 320, 1986, pp. 86-87
  6. ^ V. Courtillot, J. Besse, D. Vandamme, JJ Jaeger, R. Montigny, Deccan trap volcanism as a cause of biologic extinctions at the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary? , CRAcad.Sci. Paris, 303 (II), 863-868 (1986). J. David Archibald, Courtillot et al. a. Cretaceous extinctions: multiple causes , Science, Volume 328, 2010, p. 973, Courtillot, Fluteau Cretaceous extinctions: The volcanic hypothesis , Science, Volume 328, 2010, pp. 973-974
  7. ↑ How Viluy Traps in Eastern Siberia on an extinction end of the Devonian . Courtillot, Earth Planetary Sci. Letters, Volume 300, 2010, p. 239
  8. ↑ Chenet, Fluteau, Courtillot, Earth Planetary Science Letters, vol 236, 2005, pp 721
  9. ↑ In various measurement data, such as the variations in the length of day (LOD), in which the atmosphere also plays a role due to small changes in the moment of inertia, temperature data or periodicities of ocean currents.
  10. ↑ Vincent Courtillot, Yves Gallet, Jean-Louis Le Mouël, Frédéric Fluteau, Agnès Genevey Are there connections between the Earth's magnetic field and climate? , Earth and Planetary Science Letters, Volume 253, 2007, pp. 328-339 and subsequent discussion, ibid, Volume 256, 2008, p. 308
personal data
SURNAME Courtillot, Vincent
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French geophysicist
DATE OF BIRTH March 6, 1948
PLACE OF BIRTH Neuilly-sur-Seine