Tanya Atwater

Tanya Atwater is an American geophysicist and marine geologist who specializes in plate tectonics, in particular the evolution of the San Andreas fault plate boundary. Her educational work has focused on the creation of computer-animated multimedia products and presentations depicting plate tectonic histories.

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 Oceanography. She is presently a professor of geological sciences at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Director of the UCSB [http://emvc.geol.ucsb.edu/ Educational Multimedia Visualization Center] . She was a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before joining the faculty at UCSB in 1980.

Awards and honors

* 1997, elected to the National Academy of Sciences
* 2002, National Science Foundation 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 [ [http://www.geotimes.org/aug02/society.html "Geotimes", July 2002] ] .

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 sea-floor 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.

See also

* Plate tectonics
* Triple junction

References

External links

* [http://www.geol.ucsb.edu/faculty/atwater/ Faculty homepage]
* [http://emvc.geol.ucsb.edu/downloads.php Plate-tectonics and other geological animations]