After joining the USGS in 1939,[8]: 41 his first assignment was in 1940—D. Foster Hewett, head of the metals section at the USGS, frequently visited Harvard until the outbreak of World War II. Hewett established the Strategic Minerals Program, and recruited Pecora, who was assigned to study nickeliferous deposits in the western United States and in Brazil, among other locations in North and South America. In total, Pecora and his colleagues described nine new minerals, including whewellite. The significance of this work was described in a memorial to Pecora by Charles A. Anderson:[3]
Bill found that the richer deposits of nickel were the result of long weathering of pyroxenite or peridotite during a complex physiographic history and that serpentinite was not a favorable rock for the residual accumulation of nickel. Garnierite in the nickel-silicate deposit near Riddle, Oregon, had three modes of occurrence, reflecting an orderly variation in color, specific gravity, and nickel content, which serve as useful guides for economic geologists.
Pecora married Ethelwyn Elizabeth Carter of Franklin County, Kentucky, on April 7, 1947. They had two children, William Carter Pecora, born in 1949, and Ann Stewart Pecora, born in 1953.[3]
In 1949, he started a large-scale geologic mapping program of eight fifteen-minute quadrangles in the Bearpaw Mountains. There were eight maps published between 1960 and 1963. In 1956, Pecora had published a review paper on carbonatites, describing their formation. In a 1962 paper, he concentrated on the carbonatite deposits in the Bearpaw Mountains.[3]
In 1957, Pecora was selected as Chief of the Branch of Geochemistry and Petrology. He established programs in geochronology, experimental petrology, and mineralogy. In 1961, he returned to research in his former capacity. He was named Chief Geologist in 1964 and a year later was appointed Director of the Geological Survey by U.S. president Lyndon B. Johnson. As director, he pressed for programs that would be responsive to emerging national problems, such as investigations of gold resources and off-shore oil and gas exploration. He established the National Center of Earthquake Research in response to problems revealed by the 1964 Alaska earthquake. He also advocated for the creation of a remote sensing satellite that would be used to gather information about the surface of the Earth, which became the Landsat program, the longest-running project for gathering images of Earth from space.[9] Pecora was USGS director when the Astrogeology Research Program began in 1963.[10]
Pecora also addressed the discovery of large reserves of oil and gas on the north coast of Alaska in 1968. Under his direction, the Geological Survey made a careful study of the geologic aspects of the proposed pipeline route. From 1947 to 1967 he was a member of the United States Civil Service Commission's Board of Examiners for Geology, concerned with the development and maintenance of standards in the selection of geologists for federal employment. He was an active member of the Survey's Pick and Hammer shows, which were presented annually to make fun of top survey managers. In 1970, Pecora expressed his opposition to burying the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System, as it would be unsafe to place an underground pipeline in Arctic land He was appointed to serve as Under Secretary of the Interior in the Department of the Interior by president Richard Nixon on April 1, 1971.[11]
He died at age 59 on July 19, 1972, at George Washington University Hospital after having surgery for diverticulitis the previous month. A statement from president Nixon called him "a remarkable civil servant and an internationally respected figure in the scientific community".[11]
The William T. Pecora Award was established in 1974 to honor Pecora, and is sponsored jointly by the Department of the Interior and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). It is presented annually to individuals or groups that make outstanding contributions toward understanding the Earth by means of remote sensing.[12]
