Robert D. Hatcher

Robert Dean Hatcher Jr. (born October 22, 1940, in Madison, Tennessee) is an American structural geologist, known as one of the world's leading experts on the geology of the southern and central Appalachians.

Biography
Hatcher attended high school at Springfield, Ohio's Northwestern High School, where he graduated in 1957. At Vanderbilt University, he graduated in 1961 with a B.A. (major in geology and chemistry, minor in mathematics) and in 1962 with a M.S. (major in geology, minor in chemistry). In 1965 he received a Ph.D. in structural geology from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville (UTK) with thesis supervised by George David Swingle (1922–1973). In 1965 Hatcher married Diana Simpson. After about one year as an employee of the Humble Oil and Refining Company (now merged into ExxonMobil), he was appointed an assistant professor at Clemson University. There he was promoted to full professor and taught geology and mineralogy from 1966 to 1979. He and his family in 1978 moved to Tallahassee, Florida, where he was appointed a professor of geology at Florida State University and in 1980 moved to Columbia, South Carolina, where he was a professor until 1988 at the University of South Carolina. In 1986 he returned to Tennessee, where he accepted a joint appointment at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville (UTK) and at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) as Distinguished Scientist and Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences. In 2000 he terminated his position at ORNL but continued as professor at UTK until he retired as professor emeritus in 2018. From 1981 to 1988 Hatcher was the co-editor-in-chief, with William Andrew Thomas (1936–2022), of the Geological Society of America Bulletin.

Hatcher has been concerned about geological aspects of nuclear waste disposal and nuclear reactor safety. For disposal of radioactive waste, he served from 1984 to 1986 as science adviser to South Carolina governor Richard Riley. Hatcher served from 1990 to 1996 on the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) Board on Radioactive Waste Management and from 1993 to 1996 on a Nuclear Regulatory Commission Federal Advisory Committee on reactor safety.

Research
Hatcher's research involves fieldwork more than theory. Most of his research is interdisciplinary, combining wide knowledge from the geosciences. The goal of much of his research is the better understand the evolution of continental crust, by means of studying mountain chains and mature crust. His research on structural geology has focused on "large faults, mountain chains, formation and breakup of supercontinents, and neotectonics." He is the author or co-author of mmore than 200 scientific publications and the co-author or co-editor of several books. Although he has been mostly concerned with the Appalachians, he has several times visited the North American Cordillera in Canada and the US, the Caledonides in the U.K. and Scandinavia, the Alps, Morocco's High Atlas and Meseta, the Tatra Mountains, and the Southern Andes in Argentina. He has also done smaller amounts of fieldwork in China's Qinling (Qin Mountains), the Olkhon region in Siberia, the Mexican Cordillera, and several other regions.

Beginning in the 1970s, he was a leader in the plate tectonic reassessment of the tectonics of the Ridge-and-Valley Appalachians using terrane analysis. The reassessment was motivated by the search for oil and gas caused by the oil crisis in the 1970s. With Jack E. Oliver, Sidney Kaufman (1908–2008), and other colleagues, he used COCORP seismic-reflection profiling to investigate a seismic transversal in the southern Appalachians. They discovered that the Blue Ridge Mountains formed a 200 km long tectonic blanket similar to that observed in the Alps. His geological map of the Appalachians was published in 1990 and replaced that of Harold Williams. With Harold Williams he wrote the important paper Suspect terranes and accretionary history of the Appalachian orogen published in 1982 in the journal Geology.

For many years, Hatcher wanted to do fieldwork related to earthquakes that do not occur on plate boundaries. In 2008 Hatcher was part of a group of geoscientists who received funding from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) to investigate the paleoseismology of the Eastern Tennessee Seismic Zone. This seismic zone is the second most active in the eastern USA — the New Madrid Seismic Zone being the most active. In 2012 he and his colleagues "found a thrust fault east of Knoxville that displaced bedrock for about one meter over Quaternary river sediment."

He was instrumental in the planned Appalachian Deep Hole Project (ADCOH), which was proposed for deep drilling through the overthrust of the Blue Ridge Mountains into underlying sedimentary rocks. Although the project was eventually cancelled, preliminary work on the project brought important insights into the tectonics of the Appalachians and was published in a report.

Hatcher has been the leader or co-leader of more than 40 field trips for professional societies and meetings and is the author or co-author of numerous field trip guidebooks. He and his colleagues have done research on "crustal-scale faults, large crystalline thrust sheets, lithotectonic terranes, geophysics, stratigraphy, and paleoseismicity."

Awards and honors
In 1989 Hatcher was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He is also a Fellow of the Geological Society of America (GSA) and the American Geosciences Institute (AGI). He was in 1993 the president of the GSA and in 1996 the president of the AGI. From the GSA, he received in 1988 the GSA Distinguished Service Award, in 2006 the Penrose Medal, and in 2020 the Florence Bascom Geologic Mapping Award. He received in 1997 from the American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG) the I. C. White Award and in 2001 from the AAPG's Eastern Section the John T. Galey Award. The AGI awarded him in 2006 the Ian Campbell Medal and in 2014 the Marcus Milling Legendary Geoscientist Medal. Among other honors and awards, he was made in 1998 an honorary citizen of West Virginia by that state's governor (Cecil H. Underwood).

Articles

 * (over 600 citations)
 * (over 450 citations)

Books

 * x+518 pages; an introductory text primarily for undergraduates not majoring in geology
 * iv+223 pages; volume originated from Geological Society of America Penrose Conference held in Helen, Georgia, in May 1980
 * xxi+634 pages; earlier editions by Hatcher alone
 * xii+531 pages
 * xvi+525 pages
 * v+463 pages
 * book description, GSA Online Store; table of contents with abstracts for chapters (geoscienceworld.org
 * vii+641 pages
 * vii+641 pages