Rate My Professor Tanya Atwater

Tanya Atwater is an Emeritus Professor of Tectonics in the Geoscience Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She received her B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley in 1965 and her Ph.D. from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in 1972. Her career includes research positions at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in 1965, the University of Chile in 1966, Stanford University from 1970 to 1971, and faculty appointments at Scripps Institution of Oceanography from 1972 to 1973, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1974 to 1980, and the University of California, Santa Barbara since 1980. Atwater has participated in numerous oceanographic expeditions in the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, including twelve dives to the deep sea floor in the submersible Alvin.

Atwater's research focuses on tectonics, encompassing sea floor spreading processes, propagating rifts, oceanic crust formation, and the plate tectonic history of western North America, particularly the San Andreas fault system. She pioneered quantitative applications of plate tectonics to continental geology using marine magnetic anomalies and Deep Sea Drilling Project data. Key publications include "Implications of Plate Tectonics for the Cenozoic Tectonic Evolution of Western North America" (1970, GSA Bulletin), "Origin of Fracture Zone Topography" (1969, Nature, with H. W. Menard), and "Changes in Direction of Sea Floor Spreading" (1968, Nature, with H. W. Menard). Her contributions have profoundly influenced understanding of global tectonic theory and land features like the San Andreas Fault and Cascadia volcanic arc. Atwater has earned the Penrose Medal (2019, Geological Society of America), Wollaston Medal (2022, Geological Society of London), election to the National Academy of Sciences (1997), Leopold von Buch Medal (Germany), NSF Director’s Award for Distinguished Teaching Scholars, AAAS Newcomb Cleveland Prize (1980), and fellowships in the American Geophysical Union and Geological Society of America. She directs the Educational Multi-Media Visualization Center at UCSB, creating geological animations for education, and delivers public lectures, teacher workshops, and field trips.