Professor Tjeerd Van Andel (1923- 2010)

It is with great sadness that the University announces the death of Professor Tjeerd Van Andel, the Honorary Professor of Earth History, Quaternary Science and Geo-Archaeology in the Department of Earth Sciences and husband of the Principal of Homerton College, Dr Kate Pretty. Tjeerd was educated in the Netherlands. In the early 1950's he worked for Bataafse Petroleum in Amsterdam and then for Shell in Venezuela. He went to Scripps Institution of Oceanography in 1956 and in 1968 became Professor of Oceanography and Head, Division of Marine Geosciences at Oregon overlapping with being Professor of Oceanography and Professor of Geophysics, at Stanford for 1976-84. He became Wayne Loel Professor of Earth Sciences there in 1984. During this period he received numerous honours and awards. He took part in many cruises including the epic submersible dive in 1977 which discovered the astonishing and unexpected primitive life forms living round hydrothermal vents, 2 miles down on the floor of the deep ocean on the Galapagos Ridge.