Robert R. Coats

Robert Roy Coats
Robert Roy Coats
Born	November 22, 1910 Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Died	January 12, 1995(1995-01-12) (aged 84) Aptos, California, United States
Residence	USA
Citizenship	American
Institutions	University of Alaska, 1937 U.S. Geological Survey (1939-)
Alma mater	University of California at Berkeley, 1938

Robert Roy Coats (1910–1995) was an American geologist known for his studies of the Aleutian Islands and his exhaustive report of Elko County, Nevada. He was born in Toronto, Canada, and grew up in Marshalltown, Iowa and Seattle, Washington. He graduated valedictorian of his high school class in Seattle at the age of 16, and attended the University of Washington, where he received both a B.S. and M.S. degree in Geology and Mining (1931 and 1932). He continued graduate work at the University of California, Berkeley, receiving his doctorate in 1938, with a thesis on the ore bodies of the Virginia City mining district in Nevada. He was known as an eccentric and brilliant student.

In 1937, Coats took a teaching job at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. He left that job for a post with the U.S. Geological Survey in 1939, in Washington, D.C.. As part of the Alaska Branch of the USGS, he continued working in Alaska, mapping in the Chichagof, Anikovik, Nome, Solomon, Kigluaik and Kobuk River areas, among others. During World War II, he spent time in the Aleutian Islands, returning in 1946 as part of the Survey’s Volcano Project. His field work in the Aleutians led to his 1962 paper (see references) on the origin of the Aleutian island arc. That prescient synthesis of tectonics and magmatism of the Aleutian arc contained several of the essential ideas of the subsequent paradigm of plate tectonics. He correctly interpreted: