Maurice Lugeon

Maurice Lugeon was a Swiss geologist born July 10, 1870, in Poissy, near Paris, France, who died October 23, 1953, in Lausanne, Switzerland, and who pioneered the theory of nappe tectonics, the study of large-scale rock sheets thrust over one another during mountain building; the lugeon, a unit of rock mass transmissivity defined as one litre of water per minute injected into one metre of borehole at ten atmospheres of pressure, is named in his honor. A pupil of Eugene Renevier, he served as professor of geology at the University of Lausanne from 1906 until his retirement in 1940 and worked as an expert consultant on dam site geology, publishing Dams and Geology in 1933. He won the Marcel Benoist Prize in 1932, was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, won the Gustav Steinmann Medal in 1949, and received the Wollaston Medal in 1938.