Dr. Robert Hatcher:
UT Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences
To a geologist, rocks and the structures they display chronicle our Earth's history, revealing ancient colliding continents, elevated mountain chains now eroded, and deep burials where rocks flow like hot tar. They tell of faults, capable of moving pieces of crust hundreds of miles, and of magma crystallized at great depths or as lava on the Earth's surface. Layers of ancient plants tell of oceans no longer with us, and by decaying to organic residues, provide us fuels for industry.
Robert Hatcher is an authority on the geology of the Appalachian Mountains, comparing that anatomy with what is known of other mountain chains. For him the entire chain serves as a generic mountain range upon which to base investigations of the evolution of the Earth's continental crust, most especially those processes underlying huge thrust faults, where gigantic slabs of rock are pushed intact onto continents and plastic deformation occurs in the deeper crust.
Hatcher's study takes many forms - ranging from the microscopic analysis of rocks to trace-element chemical and isotopic analyses to three-dimensional reconstruction of entire regions. He is one of the few geologists who works with both the interior and exterior geology of mountain chains. In 1997, his group began work on a large-scale reconstruction of the tectonic history of the southern Appalachian Valley and Ridge, dating back to the Paleozoic Era some 325 to 260 million years ago when the Appalachians were formed. The work is expected to shed light on the distribution of oil and natural gas in this area.
Hatcher received the I.C. White Memorial Award for outstanding contributions to knowledge of Appalachian geology in 1997. A third edition of his textbook, Structural Geology, Principles, Concepts and Problems was published in 2001.
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