Georges Clauzon and the Messinian salinity crisis

Abstract

Georges Clauzon was maitre-Assistant at the University of Aix-en-Provence, associated to a Departement of Geography in the early seventies. Apparently, he worked all by himself in the Maritimes Alps, trying to unravel the causes of some strange anomalies he noticed in the paleogeo-morphology and in the karst topography of Mesozoic carbonates. I met him in Lyon in September 1971, at the 5th Congress of the Committee of Mediterranean Neogene Stratigraphy (CMNS). Chair of the Congress was Professor M. Vigneaux, who insisted very much with me to have a preliminary report on the first exploratory drilling campaign of the Glomar Challenger in the Mediterranean (August–September 1970). Nothing was published yet, but the exciting news presented in press conferences and in newspapers, depicting a deep desiccated Mediterranean in the Messinian, followed by a catastrophic Early Pliocene flooding, justified the general curiosity. I had no visual documents with me, but the information presented specifically on three drilling sites, Site 125 located on the crest of the Mediterranean ridge in the Ionian basin, Site 132 in the western part of the Tyrrhenian sea and Site 134 SW off Sardinia, on the passive margin of the Balearic basin, where Early Pliocene oozes directly overlie …