JACQUES TOURET (1936-2o24)
Jacques Touret passed away on 11 March 2024 in Paris at the age of 88 after a long illness. Jacques was a pioneer in the field of fluid inclusions and its applications in high-grade metamorphic rocks. In his retrospective paper in Geoscience Frontiers (Touret, 2014), Jacques described himself as someone who dedicated ”…a great part of my scientific life to the study of minute bubbles in rocks issued from the most extreme depths of our mother Earth”. He will be remembered as a very amiable person and his infectious enthusiasm for fluid inclusions.
Early Life and Education
Jacques Léon Robert Touret was born on January 2, 1936, in Fumay (Ardennes, France). He studied at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure de Géologie (ENSG) in Nancy and the University of Nancy and obtained a MSc degree in engineering geology in 1958.
Academic and Professional Career
Early Career: From 1959 onwards, he was a lecturer at Ecole Nationale Supérieure de Géologie and started his PhD on the geology, petrology, and geochemistry of the Bamble area in southern Norway, with Prof. Marcel Roubault (director of the ENSG) as his formal supervisor and Prof. Tom F.W. Barth (Mineralogical-Geological Museum in Oslo) as his actual supervisor. Jacques proposed in 1971 that the formation of granulites in southern Norway was related to the influx of CO2-rich fluids. It was during his PhD research that Bernard Poty, Alan Weisbrod, and Jacques made Nancy a world-renowned place for geological fluid research.
Academic Appointments: Jacques was appointed as an associate professor in structural geology at the Université de Nancy after he completed his PhD in 1969, followed by an appointment as a professor in petrology at the Université Paris 7 in 1972. In 1980, he became professor at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, where he established an international centre of expertise for fluid inclusion studies.
Later Years and Contributions
Retirement and Volunteer Work: After his retirement, he moved back to France and became a volunteer for ABC Mines (Association des Amis de la Bibliothèque et des Collections de l'Ecole des Mines de Paris), being involved with giving lectures and organizing geology excursions. As a board member of French Committee on the History of Geology, he wrote numerous publications on the history of geological research.
Editorial and Research Support: Jacques actively supported the publication of fluid inclusion research results as an editorial board member of several journals, including Comptes Rendus de l'Académie des Sciences, Geofluids, Contributions to Mineralogy and Petrology, Geologie en Mijnbouw, Lithos, Mineralogical Magazine, and Ore Geology Reviews.
Awards and Recognitions
He was a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (since 1988), the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters (since 1995), and Academia Europaea (since 1994).
He received numerous awards and prizes, including an honorary doctorate at the University of Liège (Belgium) in 2001, the André Dumont and the Van Waterschoot Van der Gracht medals by the Belgium and Dutch geological societies in 1992 and 1996, respectively, and the François Ellenberger prize, together with his wife Lydie, by the French Committee on the History of Geology in 2023.
From Frezzotti et al. (2024), Geoscience Frontiers, 15/4, 101845.