Walter is a coastal geomorphologist/sedimentologist with over 35 years of professional experience and is a broad based geoscientist with experience in surface mining (heavy mineral, peat, sand & gravel), groundwater pollution and shoreline mapping for contingency planning. Walter has taught and co-taught over 250 week-long seminars on "Modern Clastic Depositional Environments" principally along the South Carolina coastline but also internationally for both the ground water and petroleum industries as well as for academic institutions.

These field seminars have been taught for many energy companies including BP America, Suncor, Conoco/Phillips, Encana, Apache and Chesapeake Energy. He is the founder and president of Athena Technologies, Inc. founded in 1987 specializing in shallow stratigraphic studies of modern depositional systems. Walter has conducted research in Europe on the coastline of France, the Middle East (Kuwait and Abdul Dhabi), Africa (Nigeria), Central America (Panama), the Caribbean and throughout much of the United States including Alaska and the Hawaiian islands. In 2006 he presented the Annual Honorary Address for the Canadian Society of Petroleum Geologists in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. In 2014, he was invited to teach two seminars for the Southwest Section of the AAPG on modern clastic depositional systems for the Bill Hailey Memorial Short Course Series. He has worked on basin projects from the Gulf Coast through the Western Canadian Basin. Walter has published numerous papers on modern clastic deposition ranging from fluvial/alluvial valley topics to the continental shelf margin.

His approach toward teaching field seminars on modern clastic depositional systems is to start with the review of the mechanics/processes of sedimentation and build on the physical evolution of key depositional environments such as the shoreface. This seminar is centered around the modeling of depositional systems (estuaries, shorelines, deltas and alluvial valleys) with ultimately viewing the three dimensional setting as it might appear in the ancient geologic record.