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Atwater's research has concerned many aspects of plate
tectonics (the modern version of continental drift), both at
sea and on the land and at all scales, from global to
local.
In the oceanic realm, Atwater has
participated in or led numerous oceanographic expeditions in
the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, working with surface and
deep towed instruments and diving to the deep ocean floor
(twelve times) in the tiny submersible Alvin. She worked
many years on the volcano-tectonic processes involved in the
making of new oceanic crust at sea floor spreading centers.
Her 1968 Science paper (written in her first year of
graduate school with her graduate advisor Mudie)
established, for the first time, the faulted nature of
spreading centers. She led or was a member of the scientific
parties for several of the early submersible studies of
spreading centers, including the expeditions that located
the ocean floor warm springs with their strange biology and
the "black smoker" super-hot springs. Related to this work,
she led or participated in numerous field trips to on-land
occurrences of suspected oceanic crust in Iceland,
Newfoundland, Soviet Georgia, Cyprus, California, to get a
first hand, daylight look at these features.
Atwater was part of the team, led by
Richard Hey, that first characterized the "propagating
rifts" near the Galapagos Islands . These are the primary
features created when sea floor spreading centers realign
themselves in response to plate motion changes or uneven
magma supplies. In a series of expeditions, this Galapagos
team worked out the fundamental geometry of a presently
active system. She and her student Severinghaus then went on
to establish the existence of numerous fossil propagating
rifts in the sea floor of the northeast Pacific,
establishing them as a ubiquitous features, and exploring
their implications for plate motion instabilities. Two
papers are still in preparation from this work, one
establishing the existence of a remarkable pair of giant,
dueling, overlapping propagating rifts on the mid-Cenozoic
Farallon-Vancouver plate boundary.
With her graduate school mentor Menard,
Atwater created the first magnetic isochron map of the
northeast Pacific ocean floor in 1970. She published its
update and revision (in Menard's honor) with her graduate
student Severinghaus in 1989. These particular maps are the
definitive data bases used by all researchers who study the
creation and evolution of this ocean basin and of the plate
tectonic history of western North America.
Atwater is perhaps best known for her work
on the plate tectonic history of western North America. For
decades, her 1970 paper on the birth and growth of the San
Andreas fault system was required reading in geology courses
all across North America. She has returned to this work in
the last decade, updating and expanding it. In the last few
years she has been refining these relationships, trying to
more firmly establish the plate tectonic origins of the
Rocky Mountains and the Great Basin. Currently, she is
involved in several projects with Joann Stock at Cal Tech,
using recent improvements in the global oceanic data base to
refine and sharpen the resolution of late Cenozoic plate
reconstructions along the rim of North America. The on-land
geological community has, meanwhile, made great strides in
both conceptual understanding and the quantification of
various regional continental deformations. The compilation
and combination of these refinements from the oceanic and
continental realms allow a much tighter time/space budget of
the late Cenozoic development of western North America,
presented in an invited paper for the Clarence Hall
Symposium Volume, submitted for review, Jan 1998. Many
aspects of the geologic history of southern California and
northern Mexico are fundamentally tied to the plate tectonic
evolution of the area. Atwater is working on a number of
local projects exploiting these relationships, including
work in progress concerning the implications of a fossil
forest discovered near Moorepark, various field guide
compilations integrating plate tectonic and geologic
histories, and work with J. Stock on Mexican geologic
correlations.
The Science Citation Index supplies one
type of objective measure of the esteem in which Atwater's
work is held. While most papers in the scientific literature
are cited just a few times, if at all, Atwater's citations
are regularly measured in the tens and hundreds. Her classic
1970 paper has more than a thousand citations.
Atwater is driven by an abiding need to
bring earth education / earth love to as many of the world's
citizens as possible. (Love it or lose it!) She is deeply
involved in the undergraduate program, teaching, counseling
students and leading curriculum modernization efforts. She
produced an introductory teaching film about plate tectonics
that has sold many hundreds of copies and is widely used in
introductory classes across the nation. She runs numerous
K-12 teacher workshops and field trips, regularly lectures
for civic groups, and consults regularly with the press, TV
producers and museum designers. She regularly, freely
consults with colleagues from all aspects of the
geosciences, helping them to put their specialized works
into the broader context of the plate motions and histories.
She is presently deeply involved in the production of
geologic computer animations to explain and illustrate her
plate tectonic work. While these animations began as a
project for the Smithsonian Museum and for other public
education projects, they have been enthusiastically embraced
as a research visualization tool by numerous colleagues
across the nation. They will soon be released over the Web
for general use. She is in very great demand as a speaker
for institutions of all levels, with regular repeat
invitations from the most prestigious.
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