Robert D. Hatcher, Jr.

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. 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. He is the author or co-author of more than 200 scientific publications and the co-author or co-editor of several books. 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."

Hatcher has been the leader or co-leader of more than 40 field trips for professional societies and meetings 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. 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 Among other honors and awards, he was made in 1998 an honorary citizen of West Virginia by that state's governor (Cecil H. Underwood).

Selected publications 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