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Prior to my entering the Army during the Korean War, I worked on the Missouri Pacific Railroad. Because of my railroad experience, I was assigned in Korea to the 3rd Transportation Military Railway Service (TMRS), at its Headquarters Company in Yongsan, Korea, a suburb of Seoul. I worked in the Mains Office, the nerve center for all military rail activities in Korea during the Korean War. The Mains Office issued orders to the operating battalions and monitored rail movements of troops and war materials.

After the war, I attended college on the G.I. Bill, acquiring the Ph.D. in geology from Stanford University, and all course work for the Ph.D. in biology. Early in my geology career, I worked in oil exploration in the Williston Basin of North Dakota and the Permian Basin of Texas and New Mexico, and in research at the Amoco Research Center in Tulsa, OK.

I spent most of my career as an academic teacher and researcher at Virginia Tech. I directed a large graduate program on the stratigraphy of Cretaceous and Tertiary age microscopic marine algae (the type organisms that are converted to oil) all along the Atlantic Coast. Our work was valuable to oil exploration of the continental shelf under the Atlantic Ocean bordering the eastern United States. My research interests also included how thermal evolution of the earth controls the evolution of earth's biosphere. I did the first work indicating that global greenhouse conditions can trigger global mass extinctions, in the process originating one side of the scientific debate on cause of the great global mass extinction at the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary 65 million years ago during which the dinosaurs disappeared. I created the volcano-greenhouse extinction theory, and my opponent, Luis Alvarez, a Nobel Prize winner who had been on the mission that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, originated the asteroid-impact extinction theory. While at Virginia Tech, I also consulted to the U.S. Geological Survey.

I retired from my academic career at Virginia Tech in 1995 and am now involved in many types of projects that include book and music writing.