Jörn Wichert has been working with slate as a building stone for more than 25 years and has visited numerous deposits in Europe and the USA in this context. He has conducted deposit surveys and extensive material science investigations for a wide variety of slate deposits. These include determining geological setting, stability calculations for mines as well as petrographic, mineralogical, and rock mechanical investigations. Jörn Wichert’s main occupation is dealing with engineering geological and geotechnical issues in the field of mass movements such as rockfalls and landslides. This includes numerical models for stability calculations, safety concepts for slopes and the planning as well as the installation of monitoring systems and the development of expert systems. This work took the author to Svaneti in the Greater Caucasus (Georgia). This region consists largely of slate, so he also conducted initial investigations on the material properties and mining potentials.Another field of research for the author is the influence of fires on the strength of sandstone as a building stone and of forest fires on the stability of sandstone rocks in the Elbe Sandstone Mountains, a mountain range which stretches across the border between Germany and the Czech Republic.
