Reinout Willem van Bemmelen

Reinout Willem van Bemmelen was a Dutch geologist born April 14, 1904, in Batavia, Dutch East Indies, who died November 19, 1983, in Oberdrauburg, Austria, and who studied at Delft University from 1920 to 1927, taught at the Technical University of Vienna from 1933 to 1935, became a professor at Utrecht University from 1950, and worked as a consultant to Royal Dutch Shell. He specialized in structural geology, economic geology, and volcanology, is known for his Undation Theory proposing that vertical flow in the mantle driven by geochemical differentiation caused mountain building, extensively studied the geology of Java and Sumatra in his 1949 book The Geology of Indonesia, and later integrated his theory with plate tectonics in his 1972 work Geodynamic Models. He received the Wollaston Medal in 1977.