Person
Michel Siffre
French speleologist whose cave isolation experiments tested how people experience time without ordinary external cues.
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Background on Michel Siffre
Background
Selected excerpts from Wikipedia. This is general background, not Angle's reporting, and it may have changed since the stories above were published.
Michel Augustin Francis Siffre (French: [sifʁ]; 3 January 1939 – 25 August 2024) was a French geologist, speleologist and underground explorer. He is especially known for the chronobiology experiments he conducted on himself.
Early life, family and education
Siffre was born and raised in Nice, France. His parents were Jean and Lucie (Roques) Siffre.
He earned a degree in geology in 1960 at the Sorbonne.
Career
Siffre founded the Institut français de spéléologie (French Institute of Speleology) in 1962.
Initially, Siffre was planning to study a newly discovered glacier 70 km (43 mi) from Nice by remaining within it for 15 days. However, inspired by the space race, he extended the duration and examined how humans experience time by spending 62 or 63 days without time cues, cloistered 130 m (430 ft) below the surface in the abyss of Scarasson (Punta Marguareis) in the Maritime Alps between France and Italy. beginning July 1962. Subsequently, he designed or organized over a dozen underground experiments for other speleologists.
In 1972, Siffre performed a more extensive underground experiment, staying six months in Midnight Cave in southern Texas. After the experiment, he concluded that without time cues, he adjusted to a 48-hour rather than a 24-hour cycle. NASA studied his work, as did the French Army and the US government.
He conducted geology work in Sri Lanka and Guatemala, and he wrote books and delivered lectures about caves.
Siffre underwent an additional cave excursion from November 1999 to February 2000. He celebrated the New Year there, but missed the actual date by three days.
Personal life and death
After his 1972 experiment, Siffre suffered both acute and lasting effects, recovering from the isolation physically, mentally and emotionally only partially. In debt from the experiment's significant costs (even though some of it was paid through government funding), Siffre and his wife Nathalie divorced.
Siffre died from pneumonia at age 85 in Nice on 25 August 2024.
From the Wikipedia article Michel Siffre (revision of ). Wikipedia contributors; selected plain-text excerpts from this revision. Formatting, reference markers and non-prose material removed. Available under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0. Identity from Wikidata (CC0).