In 1948, Emmanuel de Martonne granted Malaurie the title of geographer/physicist of the French Polar Expeditions led by Paul Émile Victor along the West coast of Greenland and on its ice cap.

He later made this the subject of his thesis: Thèmes de recherche géomorphologique dans le nord-ouest du Groenland[1] (Geomorphological research in Northwest Greenland).

It was soon followed by other classics such as Tristes Tropiques by Claude Lévi-Strauss, Les Immémoriaux by Victor Segalen, Affables Sauvages by Francis Huxley, Soleil Hopi by Don C. Talayesva, Pour l'Afrique, j'accuse by René Dumont and Carnets d'enquêtes by Émile Zola.

Jean Malaurie led the first Franco-Soviet expedition in Siberian Chukotka in 1990, at the request of the Soviet government and of the Academician Dmitry Likhachov, Scientific Counsellor to Mikhail Gorbachev.

In this school of Siberian executives, that hosts around a thousand boarder students, representing forty-five ethnic groups, in five faculties, French is taught as the first foreign language in a compulsory course.

In the course of his 31 missions, from Greenland to Siberia, he taught a method — called "anthropogeography, from stone to man" — reminding how the history, rituals and sociology of the Arctic peoples can only be understood in the frame of a given physical environment.

These observations are linked to cybernetics with the Gaia principle, based on the conclusions of James Lovelock, shared by Jean Malaurie: the Earth would be "a dynamic physiological system that includes the biosphere and has kept our planet fit for life for over three billion years[4]".

Jean Malaurie was an ardent defender of the rights of Arctic minorities, currently threatened by the development of industries and oil activities in the Great North.

As a writer, he is the author of, among other publications, The Last Kings of Thule ("Les derniers rois de Thulé", Paris, 1955; first published in English in 1982), translated into 23 languages and now the most widely distributed book about the Inuit.

A leading light of French polar research, in the lineage of Commander Jean-Baptiste Charcot, captain of the Pourquoi-Pas ?, he is now living in Dieppe, Normandy, and getting ready to finish his life in Uummannaq, northwest coast of Greenland, where a Jean Malaurie Museum has been created that features a reconstitution of his former wintering base in a peat house.