In 1937 he and another graduate student, Robert S. Dietz, moved with their mentor Francis Parker Shepard from the University of Illinois to the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California.
During WW II, he worked in San Diego and produced maps for the U.S. Navy of sediment types from oceanographic surveys.
Again, years later, the geological processes evinced by these observations were presented in a book titled The Destruction of Sodom, Gomorrah, and Jericho, which he wrote with David Neev, his former student and colleague.
[1] In 1962 he left USC and joined the marine geology group of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI).
At his home there he maintained an orchard and apiary and produced his classic 1969 monograph A Coastal Pond Studied by Oceanographic Methods.