He was born in Ridgewood, New Jersey, the son of Ervin Thayer Drake and his wife Elizabeth Lum.
[2] At the end of the war he enrolled at Princeton University and in 1948 was awarded a Bachelor of Science degree in Engineering.
After a few years in the U.S. Navy making gravity measurements in submarines he joined the Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory of Columbia University, where he was awarded a Ph.D in geophysics in 1958.
He was a leading expert on the geology of continental margins which he studied by geophysical techniques and the results of ocean drilling programs.
Officer, Drake fueled a long-running debate when he suggested that the dinosaurs were killed off by volcanic eruptions rather than by a meteorite.