1. Jean Malaurie was a French cultural anthropologist, explorer, geographer, physicist, and writer.
18 Facts About Jean Malaurie
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Jean Malaurie was born in Mainz, occupied by French forces, into a French Catholic family of history scholars of Norman and Scottish descent.
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Jean Malaurie did his postgraduate studies in the Institut de Geographie de l'Universite de Paris, under Professor Emmanuel de Martonne who, some 15 years earlier, had taught to Julien Gracq.
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Jean Malaurie accomplished two missions in the Skansen Mountain, in the south of Disko Island, with the French Polar Expeditions.
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Jean Malaurie implemented a planning of trends in order to avoid the risks of consanguinity.
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Jean Malaurie discovered various fjords and unknown littorals, which he was authorized to name himself after French names, like the Paris Fjord, or after his Inuit travel companions such as the famous shaman, Uutaaq.
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Jean Malaurie conducted a detailed geomorphological study of the screes and high latitude geocryological ecosystems, of which he described the cyclic and strata organization.
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Jean Malaurie later made this the subject of his thesis: Themes de recherche geomorphologique dans le nord-ouest du Groenland.
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Jean Malaurie then founded in 1958, the Centre d'etudes arctiques and launched in 1960 the great CNRS journal on the Arctic: Inter-Nord.
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Jean Malaurie led the first Franco-Soviet expedition in Siberian Chukotka in 1990, at the request of the Soviet government and of the Academician Dmitry Likhachov, Scientific Counsellor to Mikhail Gorbachev.
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Jean Malaurie was the first Westerner to discover the Whale Alley in 1990 in Northeast Siberia; a monument that had remained ignored until it was first identified by the Soviet archaeologist Serguei Arutiunov in 1977.
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In 1992, Jean Malaurie founded the State Polar Academy in Saint-Petersburg, of which he was named Honorary President for life.
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Jean Malaurie was an ardent defender of the rights of Arctic minorities, currently threatened by the development of industries and oil activities in the Great North.
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Jean Malaurie has been an advisor to the four capital cities: Washington, Ottawa, Copenhagen and Moscow.
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Jean Malaurie is currently preparing, in collaboration with UNESCO, the upcoming International Congress on Circumpolar Peoples, to be held in 2011 in Greenland.
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Jean Malaurie was made a commander of the Legion d'honneur of France and was awarded the Great Gold Medal of Saint-Petersburg, and received the Patron's Medal of the Royal Geographical Society of London from Queen Elizabeth II.
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Jean Malaurie was granted the Medal of the Bear, a high distinction of the Greenlandic government, as well as many other foreign distinctions such as the Mungo Park Medal, awarded to him in 2005 by The Royal Scottish Geographic Society.
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Jean Malaurie died on 5 February 2024, at the age of 101.