Robert Ballard (Born: June 30, 1942) is a deep-sea explorer. He is best known for discovering the wreck of the Titanic in 1985. Through his explorations, he has uncovered many mysteries hidden in the depths of the ocean.
Ballard grew up in San Diego, California. As a boy, he was fascinated with stories about underwater sea exploration. His father was a missile scientist who helped his 19-year-old son get a job developing a manned submersible called Alvin. Ballard attended the University of California at Santa Barbara. While there, he traded an eventual commission in U.S. Army Intelligence for a U.S. Navy
appointment to the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts. He later went on to the University of Southern California and the University of Hawaii. In 1974, he received a doctorate in marine geology and geophysics from the University of Rhode Island.Ballard's Project FAMOUS (French-American Mid-Ocean Undersea Study) resulted in some of the first underwater field mapping. He manned a submersible to explore the Mid-Atlantic Ridge underwater mountain range at a depth of 20,000 feet (6,100 meters). In 1977, Ballard investigated the Galápagos Rift in the Pacific Ocean. This led to the discovery of hydrothermal vents in the seafloor. He found that these warm vents are surrounded by a rich ecosystem. There were colorful tube worms, giant clams, and plants that synthesize food chemically rather than with light energy. The entire system represented a major scientific discovery. Ballard went on many more expeditions. He even explored one of the Pacific Ocean's underwater volcanoes, or "black smokers." All the while, he continued to improve submersible vehicles for deep-sea exploration.
In 1985, Ballard
gained world recognition when he located the long-lost luxury liner HMS Titanic, which had struck an iceberg and sunk in the Atlantic in 1912. Ballard visited the wreck and recorded eerie close-up images. These were later widely broadcast on the National Geographic program Secrets of the Titanic. Ballard received a huge number of letters from schoolchildren who took an interest in that discovery; it was this interest that led him to launch the JASON Project. Ballard helped develop telecommunications devices that would allow students in their classrooms to follow him, via real-time video, on his expeditions. Since its founding in 1989, JASON has helped make science and mathematics come to life for millions of participants.Ballard has been involved in a host of other major discoveries. He explored the sunken German battleship Bismarck and the Lusitania (the ship whose loss led to the United States entry into World War I). He also discovered the wreck of the U.S. aircraft carrier Yorktown (lost at the Battle of Midway). In the late 1990s, he found two ancient Phoenician vessels and four 1,500-year-old ships in the Black Sea. In 2002, Ballard located and photographed PT-109, an 80-foot (24-meter) wooden interceptor vessel that in 1943 collided with a Japanese destroyer and sank in the South Pacific. This was the ship on which future president John F. Kennedy served.
Ballard has long been affiliated with Woods Hole. He has written numerous articles and books. Among them are Finding the Titanic and the autobiographical Explorations.
Tommy Cross “Discovering Titanic” 2001