[2] She earned a Ph.D. (1972) in marine geophysics from Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego.

She is director of the University of California, Santa Barbara Educational Multimedia Visualization Center where she is an emerita professor of geological sciences.

[6] Atwater is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences[7] elected for her contributions to marine geophysics and tectonics.

[9] Atwater was involved in oceanographic expeditions using deep towed instruments to explore the ocean floor.

She researched the volcano-tectonic processes responsible for creating new oceanic crust at seafloor spreading centers.

In 1968, she co-authored a research paper featuring groundbreaking work into the faulted nature of spreading centers.

[10] With Jack Corliss, Fred Spiess, and Kenneth Macdonald, she played key roles in expeditions that uncovered the distinct biology of ocean floor warm springs, which led to the discovery during the RISE project of the high temperature black smokers, undersea hydrothermal vents.

She found emerging relationships that revealed the origins of many large-scale geologic features (e.g. Rocky Mountains, Yellowstone, Death Valley, Cascade volcanoes, California Coast Ranges).