SARASIN

SWITZERLAND (see also List of Individuals)

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7.6.1843 Genève/CH - 21.6.1917 Genève/CH

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Edouard Sarasin was educated in the 1860s at Ecole Polytechnique in Paris, Heidelberg University and graduated as a physicist from Berlin University. Upon return to Geneva in 1867 he became an assistant to Auguste de la Rive, a scientist and experimenter. In 1875 he joined the scientist Louis Soret and thus was occupied with researches in optics. From 1880, Sarasin worked in limnology and there contributed particularly to seiches, as discovered in lakes by François Alphonse Forel (1841-1912). Sarasin added in the 1890s to barometer design as used in meteorology.

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Sarasin's main contribution to hydrodynamics is his works on seiches. A seiche is a mass oscillation in lakes and larger water bodies due to external forces such as earthquakes or winds. Wave heights and seiche frequency depend on lake bathymetry and geometry. Typically, the seiche frequency in Lake Geneva has the order of one hour. Sarasin investigated these waves with pressure probes developed earlier and published results relating to the lakes of Geneva, Thun, Neuchâtel and the Lake of Four Cantons in Central Switzerland. His observations were compared with a simple computational model established by Paul Du Boys (1847-1924), the famous French river engineer who previously had furnished the first computational approach for fluvial sediment transport. His results compared excellently with the observations of both Forel and Sarasin. The latter two published a common paper in 1900 at the Paris International Physics Conference. In 1904, when Sarasin was president of the Swiss Society, he presented a review on past results relating to this interesting topic in limnology.

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_{Forel, F.A., Sarasin, E. (1900). Les oscillations des lacs. Comptes Rendus Congrès International de Physique Paris.}

_{Rive, L. de la (1917). Notice sur la vie et les travaux d'Edouard Sarasin. Archives des Sciences Physiques et Naturelles Genève, Série 4 44: 320-344. P}

_{Rive, L. de la (1917). Edouard Sarasin. Verhandlungen Schweizerische Naturforschende Gesellschaft 99: 59-69. P}

_{Sarasin, E. (1880). Mouvement oscillatoire du lac Léman. Archives Société Helvétique Série 3 4: 383-386.}

_{Sarasin, E. (1895). Sur les seiches du lac de Thoune. Archives des Sciences Physiques et Naturelles Genève, Série 3 34: 368-371.}

_{Sarasin, E., Pasquier, L. du (1895). Les seiches du lac de Neuchâtel. Archives des Sciences Naturelles Physiques et Naturelles Genève, Série 3 33: 193-195.}