Hans Laubscher (1924–2015)

Abstract

Geologische Vereinigung in recognition of his research on the kinematics and mass balancing of tectonic systems. Hans Laubscher was born on 11 January 1924, in Muttenz, near Basel. After attending the Classical Gymnasium in Basel, he enrolled at the University of Basel and obtained his PhD degree in Geology in 1947 at the age of 23. He then worked for 10 years with an oil company in the southern foreland of the Venezuelan Andes, first as junior field geologist, and then as a geophysicist and staff geologist combining, as he put it, “dirty geology with clean physics”. In 1958, he returned to the Geological Institute in Basel, obtained his Habilitation with a paper on neptunian sandstone dykes and—after a year as guest professor at the University of Illinois in Urbana—was appointed successor of Louis Vonderschmitt as the Head of the Institute in Basel. It was during Laubscher’s tenure from 1966 to 1989 that this institute gained international recognition, one might add, despite its relatively limited resources. Hans Laubscher was not intimidated by the complexities of mountain belts; early on in his career, he liked to unravel what he called “tectonic knots” that evolve from the interference of different orogenic systems. Already during his PhD work, he was intrigued by the folds, thrusts and strikeslip faults in the Caquerelle Zone of the central Jura Mountains. When he returned to Basel from South America, he began to study the Jura Mountains as a tectonic system. In the 1960s, long before balancing profiles became fashionable, he recognized that accurately balanced cross sections are necessary in order to understand the kinematics and mechanics of fold-and-thrust belts. Armed with only paper, scissors and thread (before the days of computers), he constrained shortening in the Jura Mountains by the curvimetric and volumetric analysis of the folds. His brilliant quantitative kinematic reconstruction confirmed Buxtorf’s idea of decollement of the sedimentary cover above a rigid Hans P. Laubscher, Professor emeritus of Geology at the University of Basel, passed away on 2 July 2015, in Riehen, Switzerland. A leading tectonician and one of the great Alpine geologists of our time, he spent his career combining careful fieldwork with deep insight into the theoretical and experimental aspects of tectonics. At the centre of his research was the analysis of tectonic systems, from small-scale folds to mountain belts and the global puzzle of lithospheric plates through geologic time. In 1993, Hans Laubscher received the Gustav Steinmann Medal of the