Tjeerd Hendrik "Jerry" van Andel (15 January 1923 – 17 September 2010) was a Dutch geologist, oceanographer and geoarchaeologist. Over a long career he worked in both industry and academia, and his work was recognised with the award of a number of medals and distinguished fellowships. He led the first expedition and dive with the crewed submersible Alvin that discovered life around deep hydrothermal vents in 1977.^[1][2][3]

Tjeerd van Andel was born in January 1923 in Rotterdam, Netherlands. His mother and father were a psychologist and a psychiatrist. 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. Van Andel went to the University of Groningen to study archaeology in 1940, where he studied under Albert Egges van Giffen. After the 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.^[4]

Van Andel first worked for Royal Dutch Shell, Amsterdam. He later moved with Shell to Venezuela, before taking up a post at Scripps Institution of Oceanography in 1957. In 1967, Van Andel was appointed to develop a marine geology and oceanography programme at Oregon State University. In 1976, Van Andel took up a professorship in oceanography at Stanford University. At Stanford, he continued his work in marine geology, and also became involved in landscape archaeological projects in the Argolis region of the Peloponnese, Greece. 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. Here, he continued to teach, and developed new research projects in geosciences and geo-archaeology.^[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.^[6] In February 1977, Van Andel dived again on Alvin with pilot Jack Donnelly and scientist Jack Corliss, this time to the Galapagos ridge beneath the Pacific ocean. The target location for the dive had been identified the year before by marine geologist Kathy Crane, from deep-towed imagery, but this descent was the first crewed dive to the Pacific sea floor on Alvin. As they descended to 2500 m water depth, they began to see giant white clam shells, up to two feet long, in heaps on the seafloor, clustered around hot springs.^[1] Van Andel, Corliss and Donnelly were the first people to directly observe the hot, seafloor hydrothermal vents, and to see the completely unexpected deep sea fauna of molluscs and other marine animals that lived around these vents.^[7][8] During the Galapagos expedition, Alvin was equipped with a robotic arm to grab rock samples from the sea floor. Instead, it was put into service to collect shellfish. These samples then had to be bottled in vodka on ship, as the expedition had no other biological preserving medium available.^[9]

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? ^[11]

In 1985, Van Andel published the book New Views on an Old Planet, which used the stories of continental drift and plate tectonics to explore elements of the history of the planet.^[12] The book was designed to cater to non-geologists, and developed from an introductory undergraduate class that Van Andel taught. Ten years later, Van Andel published a thoroughly revised second edition with the strap line 'a history of global change', reflecting the breadth of the new volume. One reviewer commented that the book was 'the most lucid and accessible summary of earth history in print'.^[13]

Van Andel's contributions were recognised with a number of senior medals and awards, including:

• 1978 Francis P. Shepard Medal in Marine Geology
• 1984 Van Waterschoot van der Gracht Medal, from the Royal Netherlands Geological Society in 1984.

Van Andel was elected to the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1975, and in 1980, he was elected a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union. He was also a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (from 1981) and a member of the California Academy of Sciences.^[5][3][14]

Van Andel died of heart failure on 17 September 2010 in Cambridge, England, aged 87. He was survived by his wife, Kate Pretty; two daughters and two sons from previous marriages, and eight grandchildren.^[5][3]