Willem van Waterschoot van der Gracht

Willem Anton Joseph Maria van Waterschoot van der Gracht (born May 15, 1873 in Amsterdam , † August 17, 1943 in Roermond ) was a Dutch lawyer and geologist.

Life

WAJM van Waterschoot van der Gracht (abbreviated to WG) came from a patrician family in Amsterdam, his father Walther Simon Joseph van Waterschoot van der Gracht (1845–1921) was a lawyer, notary and cantonal judge, a former member of the Amsterdam Council, the First Chamber of the States General and the Parliament of the Province of North Holland . After attending grammar school in Amsterdam and Katwijk Jura, WG also initially studied law at the University of Amsterdam with a doctorate cum laude in 1899 (on the regulation of fishing), but then completed a degree in geology and mining in England and Germany at the Bergakademie Freiberg in 1903. From 1903 he was secretary of the Mining Council (Mijnraad), which existed from 1902 to 1955 and advised the government on mining issues. From 1905 to 1917 he was its head and in this role he participated in the reorganization of mining law issues in the Netherlands in 1906. From 1905 he was an engineer at the newly founded state prospecting company for minerals (Rijksopsporing van Delfstoffen, ROVD), which existed until 1923. In 1906 he found coal in the high moor de Peel (between North Brabant and Limburg), after evaluating the results of the relevant deep drilling from neighboring Germany. The find came just in time, because the government was already considering dissolving the ROVD because it was unsuccessful. He made further discoveries for the ROVD, soon had a good reputation as a mining specialist and was often called in as a consultant. From 1909 to 1913 he visited Romania, Spain, South and East Africa and Patagonia (where he charted for the governments of Chile and Argentina in Tierra del Fuego from a sailing ship). In 1913/14 he prepared a report on raw material exploration in Indonesia for the government.

From 1910 he also advised oil companies and was in the USA in 1915 on behalf of the Royal Dutch Shell . In 1918 he left the civil service to work for oil companies like Shell, mainly in North America. On his initiative, the oil magnate EW Marland undertook the first seismic reflective prospecting for oil in the USA in 1923 (with a Seismos team under Ludger Mintrop , who was friends with WG). After initially serving as President of Roxana Petroleum, a US subsidiary of Shell, he moved to Marland's Oil Company in the 1920s and became President of the Marland Oil Company of Texas (and Vice President of Marland Oil in Delaware) and directed all research from Marland. During his time in the United States, he hardly published anything. In 1928 he returned to Europe and lived on his wife's Austrian estates and began to publish again, utilizing the knowledge he had acquired in the USA ( The permo-carboniferous orogeny in the south-central United States , 1931). In 1931 he went to the USA for another year. In 1932 he was again in the civil service as an engineer ( Hoofdingenieur ) and later Dutch general inspector for mining. In this role he was in charge of mining in the Netherlands.

During this time he also compared the geological structures of the Paleozoic Era in the United States and Europe, and concluded the existence of oil and gas deposits in the European Paleozoic Era. He strongly recommended their exploration. Later, the Permian layers proved to be rich reservoir rocks for natural gas in the Netherlands.

At the beginning of the Second World War he was already retired, but tried with Ulbo de Sitter (1902–1980) and others during the occupation to find young geologists who had been deprived of their study opportunities to find employment in exploration and research for the coal industry, for example in the evaluation of the exploration results collected by the ROVD.

WG supported the continental drift theory of Alfred Wegener . When he spoke about it at the autumn conference of the AAPG in New York in 1926, WG warned against rejecting this only because no plausible mechanism was imaginable as the cause at the time and referred in this context to a similar discussion about blanket formation in the Alps during his student days, for which no mechanism was known, but which was well proven by facts.

In 1937 he became a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences . He was also an honorary member of the Koninklijk Nederlands Geologische Mijnbouwkundig Genootschap (KNGMG), the American Association of Petroleum Geologists (of which he was one of the founders in 1917 and of which he was an honorary member from 1936) and the International Association of Drilling Technology. The KNGMG awards a prize in his honor, the Van Waterschoot van der Gracht Medal. In 1924 he received an honorary doctorate from the Colorado School of Mines .

In 1901 he married Josefine Freiin von Hammer-Purgstall (daughter of Arthur Wilhelm Franz Josef Freiherr von Hammer-Purgstall (1855–1904)) in Graz. The daughter Gisèle van Waterschoot van der Gracht (1912–2013), an artist and patron of the arts, emerged from the marriage. He also had three sons.

literature

• LU de Sitter in Geologie en mijnbouw, Volume 5, 1943, No. 9/10, with a list of publications
• FR van Veen Willem van Waterschoot van der Gracht 1873-1943, en biography , Delft University Press 1996

Web links

• Dutch biography of AA Thiadens, Biografisch Woordenboek van Nederland, Volume 1, The Hague 1979
• English biography at the Dutch Akad. Der Wiss., Pdf
• Biographical information from John von Waterschoot, 2005, English
• Biography of the founding fathers of the AAPG, English

Individual evidence

1. ↑ WG was no longer with Shell at that time. A second Seismos team worked for Shell in Mexico. They were then successful in the USA in 1924 for Gulf Oil in the discovery of the Orchard Dome oil field in Texas. Ray Brown Life and Times of Ernest Whitworth Marland , Oklahoma Geological Survey, 2002