A young boy could develop quite a thirst living in the California desert.
But water isn’t why Robert Ballard claims he immersed himself in deep sea exploration, a career choice that led to hundreds of deep sea expeditions and his most famous discovery in 1985 when he found the Titanic at the bottom of the North Atlantic Ocean.
“I learned that the biggest mountain range in the world was under the ocean,” Ballard said of his deep sea expeditions and explorations, during a forum at the Hilton Lisle sponsored by Northern Trust Bank that was attended by an audience of 400.
That Mid-Ocean Ridge covers 23 percent of the Earth’s surface, and in 1973 Ballard became one of the first to enter the ridge to find the unknown, including exotic life forms in hot springs thousands of feet beneath the ocean’s surface.
While Ballard said he enjoyed the next several years exploring the ridge in a deep sea submarine, it was the commute to work that began to get him down.
“My largest problem was getting to work because it takes 2 1/2 hours to get down (to the ridge in the submarine) and another 2 1/2 hours to get up. So I could only spend three hours below the surface.”
In answer to his need, a robot submersible called Argo was created through the Woods Hole Oceanograhic Institution in Woods Hole, Mass. For the robot’s debut, Ballard and his team decided to get the public’s attention by finding the Titanic.
The group used the robot to look for and pursue a trail of debris that had fallen as the two parts of the ocean liner plunged into the ocean, a trail that eventually led to the ship.
Ballard, 56, said that as mountainous as the Titanic discovery was, and one that followed numerous acclaimed discoveries and explorations of celebrated sunken ships, just as important were the two passions it created in his life.
One, he said, was his change from an earth scientist to a self-named new area of science, deep sea archeology, a merging of oceanography with archeology.
The other came from the letters of interest from 16,000 children. That spawned his creation of Project Jason, live television satellite linkups to explorations that are viewed by children on huge screens in large auditoriums.
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