Rutten was born in Jombang, Indonesia to geologist Louis Martin Robert and biologist Johanna Catharina Pekelharing.
[1] Like his father, who was a geologist in the oil industry, he took an interest in geology and natural history travelling around the world.
At the end of the war he worked as a relief team director in the British controlled part of Germany which helped improve his command of English.
He also hypothesized that the Icelandic table mountains of basalt were formed by lava flows under an ice sheet.
He noted that the processes were the same over geological time but the environmental conditions may have varied to cause differences in the visible effects.