Peter Scholle Personal

Peter A. Scholle

What can I tell you about myself? I was born in New York in 1944 and had to work hard to overcome early childhood handicaps, now largely covered under the term "nipple confusion." I had a rather undistinguished career at the Bronx High School of Science while living in a rapidly declining neighborhood of the south Bronx (see the movie "Fort Apache, the Bronx" which featured the police precinct in which I was raised). At least I learned to run pretty fast. Because those were the days in which kids were encouraged to skip grades, I went on to college as a very immature 16 year-old and spent four, sometimes rocky, years at Yale. The first two years were spent attempting to figure out what I really wanted to do in life (sounds familiar?). After floundering through several majors like economics and history, I discovered geology while trying to evade the rigors of Yale's science reqirement. The switch to a geology major worked wonders and I have been gainfully employed at geosciences ever since. After Yale, I spent a year on a Fulbright-DAAD fellowship at the University of Munich in Germany, another year at the University of Texas at Austin, and finished up my Ph.D. at Princeton in 1970. My professional career has covered a range of employment from government to industry to academia. I worked for five years for various oil companies (Cities Service, Gulf and Chevron) and consulted for other companies for many years. Nine years were spent with the U. S. Geological Survey in Reston (VA) and Denver (CO), including three years running their Oil and Gas Branch. I taught at the University of Texas at Dallas for three years and was Albritton Professor of Geology at Southern Methodist University from 1985 to 1999. At SMU I was involved mainly with courses in environmental science and oceanography and developed computer-based courses in carbonate petrography and sedimentology. I also had the good fortune to teach field seminars in carbonate sedimentology and reef ecology in places such as the Cayman Islands, Barbados, and the Bahamas. Much of my time is also involved in research and writing. I now am the Director of the Bureau of Geology and Mineral Resources in Socorro, New Mexico, a job I greatly enjoy (most days).

On the more personal side, I am married (my wife is also a carbonate sedimentologist; she teaches in the Earth and Environmental Sciences Department at New Mexico Tech) and have three sons, who range in age from 19 to 31 (as of 2000). I even have a grand daughter, the world's cutest youngster (don't believe me? — well then, see the pictures below). I love puppy dogs and moonlight walks on the beach (oops, no — that must be a flashback to something else). Well, most of the time, I really do love my two Labrador Retreiver mix puppies. And I also enjoy hiking, woodworking and photography along with avidly collecting stamps, postcards, old stock certificates and things like that related to geology and the oil industry. I'm a bit reluctant to admit this to you, but I also collect air sickness bags from airlines of the world (somebody has to). My profession has given me a chance to visit or work in more than 70 countries around the world. In recent years, for example, I conducted studies in Greenland, New Zealand, Qatar, Denmark, and Poland. Perhaps because I have been fortunate enough to see so much of the world I am passionate in my concerns for what mankind is doing to our planet.

I should also mention that I hate to be called Dr. Scholle because it sounds much too much like a foot pad. The word "Scholle" really has a much more distinguished meaning -- it is a Baltic Sea flounder (also know as the goldbutt, Pleuronectes platessa, and yes, it is a bottom feeder). So, as my wife will gladly tell you, our family seal is "a flounder rampant on a bed of rice". It may also mean that as I get older my right eye will migrate to the other side of my face — keep an eye out for that. If you like, you can get a recipe for preparing a delicious meal of Scholle.