The ISTerre laboratory organized the 2nd French and Francophone Scientific Meeting on Volcanology on the Bourget-du-Lac campus.

These meetings are driven by the Volcanology and Chemistry of the Earth’s Interior section of the French National Committee for Geodesy and Geophysics (CNFGG) and the National Service of Volcanological Observatories (SNOV). Their goal is to strengthen connections within the French volcanology research community. The event is now open to colleagues from across the Francophone world and, this year, welcomed participants from around ten countries (including Belgium, Luxembourg, Switzerland, Singapore, the Czech Republic, and the Democratic Republic of Congo), as well as postdoctoral researchers from various other European countries.

The meeting began with a tribute to Michel Halbwachs, former professor at USMB and founder of the Geophysical Instrumentation Laboratory, which later merged into the Institute of Earth Sciences (ISTerre). Halbwachs, renowned for his pioneering work on crater lakes, passed away in March 2025. A friendly dinner in the city center followed, allowing participants to connect informally. On the second evening, a screening and discussion of Werner Herzog’s film “Into the Volcano : Requiem for Katia and Maurice Krafft” filled the cinema L’Astrée in Chambéry, where the public engaged in conversation with experts such as Aline Peltier, director of the Piton de la Fournaise Observatory, and Patrick Allard, former president of the International Association of Volcanology (IAVCEI). On the final day, a second tribute honored Gilbert Hammouya, who recently passed away after dedicating 30 years of his career to monitoring and measuring fumarolic gases at the Volcanological and Seismological Observatory of Guadeloupe (OVSG).