Dr. Pat Wilde is an oceanographer-marine geologist who served as Associate Director for Ocean Science and Engineering at the US Office of Naval Research Asian Office in Tokyo from July 1991 through July 1996.
Dr. Wilde received his B.S. in Geology from Yale University in 1957. He worked for the Exploration Division of Shell Oil Company from 1957 to 1959 as a geologists working in Lousiana,Texas, and New Mexico. In 1959, Dr. Wilde returned to academia receiving his A.M. in Geology in 1961 and his Ph.D. in Geology in 1965 from Harvard University. While at Harvard, he also was a Graduate Research Geologist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography working on the sedimentology of deep-sea fans. In 1964, Dr. Wilde joined the Engineering Faculty of the University of California, Berkeley and the Institute of Marine Resources at the University of California, San Diego. He was Chairman of the Ocean Engineering Program at Berkeley from 1968 to 1975. In 1975, he moved the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory and from 1977 to 1982 was Head of the Marine Sciences Group, whose major task was the global environmental studies associated with the Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion program of the U.S. Department of Energy. This entailed monitoring programs and surveys in the South Atlantic, Caribbean, the Gulf of Mexico, Hawaii, Samoa, and the Marshall Island. Dr. Wilde returned full time in 1982 to the Berkeley campus as Head of the Marine Sciences Group administrated through the Department of Paleontology. Here the chief interests were Paleo-oceanography and the geochemistry of marine black shales; while the OTEC program continued until 1986. In 1989, he was awarded the Humboldt Prize from the German Government and spent a year in residence as Visting Research Professor at the Institute of Geology and Paleontology of the Technical University of Berlin. In 1991, Dr Wilde accepted a position with the Office of Naval Research in Tokyo.
Dr. Wilde and his students have worked on a wide range of oceano-graphic topics ranging from the economics of manganese nodules, sediment transport on the shelf and in the deep-sea, the bathymetry off the West Coast of the US, electro-chemical measurements in sea water and sediments, through models of anoxic chemistry and circulation in the Paleozoic Oceans. He is probably best known for his work on the influence of anoxic conditions on sedimentary and biological conditions including extinction events and the geochemistry of black shales. As both a sea-going oceanographer and an interpreter of ancient marine rocks, Dr. Wilde tries to impart an multi-disciplinary approach to his work.
As a true geologist, Dr. Wilde lives on the Hayward Fault in Berkeley, California, with the mappable eastern trace of the fault zone along the wall of his back patio. Maybe that's why he likes to go the sea so much.
Dr. Wilde "retired" from both the University of California and the Navy after leaving ONR-Asia. He continues working on various projects in Oceanography and Marine Geology and can be contacted at:
E-Mail: pat.wilde.td.57@aya.yale.edu