In 1949, Faller took a one-year sabbatical from his studies at MIT to spend a year in the arctic (at the Resolute Bay weather station) collecting atmospheric data with weather balloons. While there, he and an associate discovered a cairn on Griffith Island, marking what appeared to be a grave. As a result of Faller's notice to a Canadian archeologist, it was later discovered through research that this was the grave of an officer on , buried there in 1850 during the Resolute's first search for
Sir John Franklin and pursuit of the
Passage. After returning to MIT and completing his Sc.D., Faller was a researcher at
WHOI from 1954 to 1963. From 1963 to 1989 he was a professor at the University of Maryland in the Institute of Fluid Dynamics and Applied Mathematics. His research was critical in the understanding of
Langmuir circulations. and two instabilities of Ekman boundary layers. ==Selected writings==