Robert R. Coats

Who was Robert R. Coats?

Robert Roy Coats 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. 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 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: