20th-century French geologists

Paul Fallot (25 June 1889 in Strasbourg – 21 October 1960 in Paris) was a French geologist and paleontologist. Throughout his career the Mediterranean region, and especially Spain, was the focus of his work.
Fallot began his studies in 1908 at the University of Lausanne, under the well known geologist Maurice Lugeon. In 1909 he moved to Grenoble to work at the laboratory of geologist and paleontologist Wilfred Kilian on ammonites of the Balearic Islands. In 1910-1911 he broadens his knowledge of general geology and stratigraphy at the Sorbonne led with Emile Haug.
From 1914 to 1916 he serves in the French army, which earned him the Croix de Guerre, with five honorable mentions, and the Ordre national de la Légion d'honneur Cross.
After the war, Fallot was employed by his former teacher Kilian in Grenoble and continued his work in Mallorca. His "Geological Etude de la Sierra de Majorque" appears in 1922. The next year Paul Fallot was appointed director of the Institute of Applied Geology in Nancy, a position he keeps the next 14 years. With staff and students he worked in the Jura, but his main work he performed in the Betic ranges of southern Spain and the Rif Mountains of North Africa. In 1931 the Academy of Sciences grants Fallot the Grand Prix des Sciences physiques.
His appointment in 1937 as professor of Geology of the Mediterranean at the Collège de France, seemed the opportunity to scale up his work on the tectonics of the entire area with a team of specialists, but the outbreak of World War II hindered this. During the war he stayed in Paris, prepared publications of the Geological Service of Morocco, proposes a comprehensive document together on the geology of subbetische chains and analyzes the layers of the Triassic of Algeria.
In 1948 Paul Fallot was appointed as member of the Académie des Sciences. Fallot was also one of the foreign members of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences since May 1960. The Lower Cambrian trilobite genus Fallotaspis was named in his honour.

Charles Eugène Bertrand (2 January 1851, in Paris – 18 August 1917) was a French botanist, paleobotanist and geologist. He is remembered for his research involving the formation of coal.
He studied sciences in Paris, where he had as influences botanist Joseph Decaisne and plant physiologist Pierre Paul Deherain. In 1874 he obtained his doctorate in sciences, and was later appointed professor of botany at the University of Lille (1878). From 1881 to 1887, he was head of the Archives botaniques du nord de la France.In 1878 he became a member of the Société botanique de France. He was the father of botanist Paul Charles Édouard Bertrand (1879-1944).

Roland Paskoff (20 March 1933 – 14 September 2005) was a French geologist expert in coastal geomorphology including Holocene tectonics and sea level change. While he was active studying the coast of the countries where he held university positions—that is Chile, France and Tunisia— he also conducted studies in Bahrain, Malta, the Seychelles and the Mascarene Islands.

Pierre-Roland Giot (September 23, 1919 – January 4, 2002) was a French anthropologist, archaeologist and geologist.

François Bordes (December 30, 1919 – April 30, 1981), also known by the pen name of Francis Carsac, was a French scientist, geologist, archaeologist, and science fiction writer.

Catherine Joséphine "Katia" Krafft (née Conrad; 17 April 1942 – 3 June 1991) and her husband, Maurice Paul Krafft (25 March 1946 – 3 June 1991) were French volcanologists and filmmakers who died in a pyroclastic flow on Mount Unzen, Nagasaki, Japan, on 3 June 1991. The Kraffts became well known as pioneers in the filming, photographing, and recording of volcanoes, often coming within feet of lava flows. Their obituary appeared in the Bulletin of Volcanology. Since their deaths, their work has been featured in two documentary films by Werner Herzog, Into the Inferno (2016) and The Fire Within: A Requiem for Katia and Maurice Krafft (2022), and a further film, Fire of Love (2022), depicted their lives, relationship and careers using their archived footage.