Émile Argand

Born June 1,1879, in Geneva; died Sept. 14, 1940, in Neuchatel. Swiss geologist.

Argand studied the structure of the Western Alps and produced a scheme of the development of the alpine geosyncline according to which it initially had the shape of a single depression. This depression was later modified by internal uplifts which, in the course of their development, were transformed into enormous mass overthrusts. Argand considered the basic deformation of the earth’s crust to be the formation of large protuberances and depressions under the influence of subcrustal magma flows. Against the background of these “folds in the base” there is formed the “crustal folding,” which encompasses only the surface layers of sedimentary rock. Argand’s theoretical views were presented in his work Tectonics of Asia, which was written in 1922 and translated into Russian in 1935.