Moldova.ORG -- Geologist traveled the world to study quake risks causes, relates AP.

Robert Wallace was anything but average. His career with the U.S. Geological Survey in Menlo Park extended more than 50 years, leaving a legacy in the field of earthquake research.

He helped found the survey's earthquake research program in Menlo Park in 1964 after Alaska's Good Friday earthquake -- the second-largest ever recorded -- wrecked parts of Anchorage and set off a deadly tsunami. The program brought geologists, geophysicists, experimentalists and engineers together in a coherent team.

Mr. Wallace was chief scientist of the program from 1973 until his retirement in 1987 and then worked for the survey for free, as an emeritus professor, for 11 years.

But he also found time to paint watercolor landscapes, watch birds, travel with his wife and do cowboy-style rope tricks, which he learned as a child and performed on stage during college.

``It was one of the things he took pleasure in because it was so different,'' said his son, Alan Wallace, who followed in his father's footsteps to become a USGS scientist studying mineral deposits and water resources in Nevada.

He added, ``We spent all my summers growing up pretty much out in the field.''

An authority on tectonics, earthquake geology, mineral resources and engineering geology, he received numerous awards and accolades during his career, including a medal from the Seismological Society of America and the Career Contribution Award of the Geological Society of America.

Long interested in the geology of earthquakes, he increasingly focused on what he termed paleoseismology, the study of how ancient earthquakes can be used to predict others. He was widely recognized as one of the world's leading experts on earthquake hazards.

In 1989, Mr. Wallace commented in an awards ceremony that it was a fluke that he wound up involved in that line of research: He had originally signed up to head up the USGS's Snow, Ice and Permafrost program, but the colonel who offered him the job was killed while practicing parachute jumps. ``Except for fate,'' he said, ``I would today be an iceman, or perhaps a snowman.''

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