R. D. van der Hilst Created 2026-10-20 Updated 2026-11-05
R. D. van der Hilst uses seismology to investigate Earth's interior. His teaching develops the connection between measured seismic arrivals and wave propagation, while his research includes global seismic tomography used to constrain mantle circulation.[ref][ref]
The inferential step is important: a wave-speed anomaly is an observation-dependent model, and interpreting it as temperature, composition or flow requires additional physical assumptions.