Tanya Atwater
Encyclopedia
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
geophysicist and marine geologist
Marine geology
Marine geology or geological oceanography involves geophysical, geochemical, sedimentological and paleontological investigations of the ocean floor and coastal margins...
who specializes in plate tectonics
Plate tectonics
Plate tectonics is a scientific theory that describes the large scale motions of Earth's lithosphere...
, in particular the evolution of the San Andreas fault
San Andreas Fault
The San Andreas Fault is a continental strike-slip fault that runs a length of roughly through California in the United States. The fault's motion is right-lateral strike-slip...
plate boundary. Her educational work has focused on the creation of computer-animated multimedia products and presentations depicting plate tectonic histories.
Biography
Atwater received her B.A. in Geophysics from the University of California at Berkeley in 1965 and is a '72 University of California, San Diego Alumna, holding a Ph.D. (1972) in Marine Geophysics from Scripps Institution of OceanographyScripps Institution of Oceanography
Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California, is one of the oldest and largest centers for ocean and earth science research, graduate training, and public service in the world...
. She is presently a professor of geological sciences at the University of California, Santa Barbara
University of California, Santa Barbara
The University of California, Santa Barbara, commonly known as UCSB or UC Santa Barbara, is a public research university and one of the 10 general campuses of the University of California system. The main campus is located on a site in Goleta, California, from Santa Barbara and northwest of Los...
, and Director of the UCSB Educational Multimedia Visualization Center. She was a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a private research university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. MIT has five schools and one college, containing a total of 32 academic departments, with a strong emphasis on scientific and technological education and research.Founded in 1861 in...
before joining the faculty at UCSB in 1980.
Awards and honors
- 1997, elected to the National Academy of SciencesUnited States National Academy of SciencesThe National Academy of Sciences is a corporation in the United States whose members serve pro bono as "advisers to the nation on science, engineering, and medicine." As a national academy, new members of the organization are elected annually by current members, based on their distinguished and...
- 2002, National Science FoundationNational Science FoundationThe National Science Foundation is a United States government agency that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering. Its medical counterpart is the National Institutes of Health...
Director's Award for Distinguished Teaching Scholars. This award, of $300,000 over four years, is given to help and honor distinguished scientists who are working out ways to translate research into education. The money is meant to provide teaching scholars the opportunity to expand their work beyond their home institutions.
Selected bibliography
Menard, H. W., and Tanya Atwater, 1968, Changes in direction of sea floor spreading. Nature, v. 219, p. 463-467. Reprinted in Plate Tectonics and Geomagnetic Reversals, p. 412-419, W. H. Freeman Co. San Francisco, 1973.Atwater, Tanya, 1970, Implications of plate tectonics for the Cenozoic tectonic evolution of western North America. Bull. Geol. Soc. Amer., v. 81, p. 3513-3536. Reprinted in Plate Tectonics and Geomagnetic Reversals, p. 583-609, W. H. Freeman Co., San Francisco, 1973. Reprinted in U.C.S.D., Scripps Inst. Oceanography., Contributions, Vol. 40, Part 2, p. 1249–1271, 1970.
Atwater, Tanya, and P. Molnar, 1973, Relative motion of the Pacific and North American plates deduced from seafloor spreading in the Atlantic, Indian and South Pacific Oceans. R. L. Kovach and A. Nur, eds., Proc. of the Conf. on Tectonic Problems of the San Andreas Fault, Geological Sciences, v. XIII, Stanford Univ., p. 136-148. •Reprinted in U.C.S.D., Scripps Inst. Oceanography., Contributions, Vol. 44, Part 2, p. 1362–1374, 1974.
Atwater, Tanya, 1981, Propagating rifts in seafloor spreading patterns. Nature, v. 290, p. 185 186.
Atwater, T., 1991, Tectonics of the Northeast Pacific, Transactions of the Royal Society of Canada, Series I, v. I, pp. 295–318.
Atwater, T., 1998, Plate Tectonic History of Southern California with emphasis on the Western Transverse Ranges and Santa Rosa Island, in Weigand, P. W., ed., Contributions to the geology of the Northern Channel Islands, Southern California: American Association of Petroleum Geologists, Pacific Section, MP 45, p. 1-8.