Tjeerd van Andel

He had a younger sister, Mies, and they spent some of their early years on Java, where Van Andel's interest in the past began with visits to Hindu temples.

After the Second World War, when Van Andel returned to his studies, he embarked on a PhD with geologist Philip Kuenen, completing his dissertation in 1950 on the heavy minerals and sediments of the River Rhine.

In 1987, Van Andel retired, and moved to the United Kingdom where he joined the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Cambridge as an honorary professor.

[3][5] In 1974 Van Andel led the first dives in the submersible Alvin to examine the volcanic rocks of the seafloor at the Project FAMOUS site on the mid-Atlantic ridge.

Van Andel recorded his observations in a personal diary,[10] excerpted by Naomi Oreskes: In the middle of this ... barren vastness ... a small oasis ... with coral gardens, pink and gold anemones, white crabs in great variety and profusion, yellow, brown, liver-colored fish, medusoid large clumps of some kind of mussel ten inches long, crevices filled with their huge bleached shells ... What produced this little paradise in the ... sea floor desert?

Ten years later, Van Andel published a revised second edition with the strap line "a history of global change", reflecting the breadth of the new volume.