Robert D. Ballard

American undersea explorer

• Born: June 30, 1942
• Place of Birth: Wichita, Kansas

As a pioneering undersea explorer, Ballard has made several remarkable discoveries, including the resting place of the Titanic and other ships, new life-forms along hot spots in the undersea Earth crust, and evidence supporting the theory of plate tectonics.

Early Life

Robert D. Ballard was born in Wichita, Kansas, a distant relative of the gunslinger William “Bat” Masterson, who was, for a time in the nineteenth century, the sheriff of Wichita. When Ballard was still a young boy, his family resettled to Pacific Beach, a suburb of San Diego, California, where his father worked developing the Minuteman missile. Ballard began what would become a lifelong fascination with the world under the sea. He spent countless hours exploring along the shore, dreaming of submarines, and poring over the illustrations in an edition of his favorite book, Jules Verne’s science-fiction novel Vingt mille lieues sous les mers (1869-70; Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, 1873). When he was a senior in high school, he won a competition that enabled him to spend a summer training at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography in La Jolla, California.

Ballard’s parents taught him to work hard to set and achieve his goals, and that lesson served him well while he was still a college student. At the University of California, Santa Barbara, he earned a degree in both chemistry and geology and completed the university’s Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) program, earning a commission as an Army lieutenant doing intelligence work.

After graduation, Ballard began graduate study in oceanography in Hawaii, where he also took a part-time job as a dolphin trainer at Sealife Park. This job helped him develop his skills as a writer and public speaker. In 1966 he transferred to the Navy and took a job helping to design and develop missions for submersibles for the Ocean Systems Group of his father’s employer, North American Aviation. Ballard liked this work because it combined his passions for applied science, or technology, and pure science. The next year the Navy sent him to Boston to serve as an oceanographic liaison officer in the Office of Naval Research. His duties included serving as the Navy’s liaison to the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution on Cape Cod, Massachusetts.

Life’s Work

On his first tour of Woods Hole, Ballard was attracted to Alvin, an experimental miniature research submarine capable of taking three divers to a depth of 6,000 feet, where the water pressure exceeds one ton per square inch. Ballard spent as much time as his position allowed at Woods Hole, helping map the geology of the ocean floor in the Gulf of Maine. In September 1969, he left the Navy and joined the staff at Woods Hole; three months later he descended in a submersible for the first time as part of a team studying the continental shelf off the coast of Florida.

During these years, Ballard was also a student in the PhD program in marine geology and geophysics at the University of Rhode Island. For his doctoral dissertation research, Ballard attempted to advance the plate tectonics theories of Professor Patrick Hurley of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He used Alvin to make some forty dives in the Gulf of Maine and surrounding areas, helping develop the techniques that made it possible to use the vessel’s remote manipulator arm to drill for and collect samples of bedrock. With data taken from these samples and the results of his earlier mapping work, he provided hard evidence that the continents sit on movable tectonic plates and that the American, European, and African continents were once connected. At the same time, his work helped the Alvin team demonstrate and expand the capabilities of the submersible, attracting much-needed interest and funding from both government and private agencies.

By the fall of 1971, Alvin had been rebuilt with a titanium pressure sphere, making it capable of descending to 12,000 feet, the average depth of the seafloor. This improvement made it possible for Ballard and others to explore the undersea mountain range known as the Mid-Atlantic Ridge in 1973 and 1974, in a project called the French American Mid-Ocean Undersea Study, or Project FAMOUS. With the French scientist Jean Francheteau, Ballard posited a new theory about the composition and activity of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. By this time, the capabilities of both Ballard and the submersibles were drawing scientific and popular attention, and Ballard found himself something of a celebrity. He was now chief scientist on many expeditions and was able to obtain the funding he needed for further exploration.

In 1977 Ballard led a team from Woods Hole in an exploration of the Galapagos Rift area of the Pacific Ocean near Ecuador. The team intended to study the vents that expelled warm water from beneath the ocean floor. These vents were so far beneath the ocean’s surface that no sunlight could penetrate to them, and it was supposed that no living things would be found there. Surprisingly, the researchers discovered various forms of life, including clams, crabs, bacteria, and giant tube worms, many more than eight feet long, living near underwater geysers. Oceanographers were excited by the discovery, which spurred extensive research to learn more about the chemical and biological processes that make life possible in this unlikely environment.

Ballard’s next major expedition took him to the ocean floor off the coast of Baja California, Mexico. There, in 1979, he was part of a research team that discovered “black smokers,” underwater volcanoes spewing black fluids reaching temperatures of 350 degrees Celsius through chimneys made of sulfide mineral deposits.

With improvements to Alvin continually being made, Ballard began to think that an old dream of his might become a reality: He might be able to locate the giant ship Titanic on the ocean floor. Titanic, which had sunk in 1912 on its first voyage from England to New York City, was thought to lie some 13,000 feet below the surface—too far for divers or previous submersibles to go. Government and industry figures were eager to find the sunken ship, knowing the publicity would provide a tremendous public relations boost to the finders. The military hoped that technology developed for undersea exploration could also be used for submarine warfare. Private adventurers had been searching for the ship for years. Ballard was able to gather funding and the support of the Navy, and in 1982 he established the Woods Hole Deep Submergence Laboratory (DSL). The lab team developed Argo, a sophisticated video sled about the size of a car, with floodlights and three cameras, and Jason, a smaller tethered robot vehicle that could be sent into tighter spaces than Argo could enter. The Argo-Jason system enabled a research crew onboard a ship to send and steer cameras out into the dark depths, and receive and interpret video pictures.

When testing of the Argo-Jason system was completed, Ballard and a team of French scientists launched a joint effort to locate the Titanic. The French, who had sophisticated sonar technology, would map the ocean floor in the area where the Titanic was thought to lie, and determine a smaller area for Argo to search. For five frustrating weeks, the French covered a 100-mile target area but did not locate the ship. A few days before the French left the area, Ballard and his team arrived. Drawing on the French data, the Americans limited their search to a narrower area and located the Titanic late in the night of August 31, 1985. A year later, Ballard returned to Titanic, and this time he sent the smaller Jason robot into the ship itself to photograph the interior. The pictures of the ship, with its recognizable central staircase and unopened bottles of wine, captured the imaginations of viewers around the world.

Ballard continued his exciting work, in 1989 establishing the JASON Project, a program that sent live images from Jason video robots to students at museums and science centers so that they could experience through “telepresence” some of the wonders of the undersea world. Greatly expanding the possibilities of distance learning, Ballard made it possible for more than a million students each year in thousands of classrooms around the world to work interactively with underwater cameras and other equipment far below the surface of the ocean. Ballard also pursued the interest in undersea archaeology he had demonstrated in his search for the Titanic: In the 1990s he located and photographed the German battleship Bismarck, American and Japanese warships sunk during World War II at Guadalcanal, the luxury ship Lusitania, and several trading ships from the Roman Empire, some as old as two thousand years.

Ballard retired from Woods Hole in 1997 and founded the Institute for Exploration, dedicated to expanding the fields of underwater archaeology and deep-sea geology. Two years later, the institute merged with the Mystic Aquarium in Connecticut to form the Sea Research Foundation’s Institute for Exploration, with Ballard as president. The institute developed underwater vehicles that carry sensing and imaging equipment to depths far beyond where humans could safely go and that send data back to researchers at the surface.

In 1998, Ballard again set out to locate sunken ships, this time in the Pacific Ocean near the island of Midway, where an important battle was fought between the Japanese and the Allies during World War II. Using the latest technology for undersea exploration, Ballard and his crew found and photographed four Japanese carriers and the American aircraft carrier the USS Yorktown more than three miles below the surface.

Ballard’s explorations continued into the twenty-first century. In 2002, working with the National Geographic Society, he located wreckage from John F. Kennedy’s PT-109, which was sunk off the Solomon Islands during World War II. Ballard also managed to find and interview the two Solomon Island natives who rescued Kennedy and his crew after they had been shipwrecked. He and archaeologist George Bass led a group of marine archaeologists to explore ancient artifacts and mollusk remains 7,000 feet down in the Black Sea, using Argus, a remotely operated tethered underwater vehicle with optical cameras. The presence of shells from freshwater species identified during this expedition lent support to a much-debated theory that the Black Sea was settled by human beings before a large-scale flood devastated the area. In 2003 he returned to the wreck of the Titanic to document the decay that had befallen the ship in the eighteen years since he had found it on the ocean floor.

Ballard’s twin passions for exploration and for teaching led him to an active parallel career as a public speaker, television host, and teacher. He was awarded the Cairn Medal of the National Maritime Museum in 2002 and was invited to speak at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in 2005. In 2004, he became a professor of oceanography and director of the Institute for Archaelogical Oceanography at the University of Rhode Island.

Upon founding and beginning to serve as president of the Ocean Exploration Trust in 2008, Ballard acquired the flagship exploration vessel Nautilus and continued his expeditions and education efforts —including through live video and audio feeds transmitted to onshore participants. While much of his team's focus remained on areas such as the Black Sea, he also engaged in another wreckage discovery mission in 2019 when he went in search of famous aviator Amelia Earhart's missing plane. While this expedition around the island of Nikumaroro did not end with the finding of the plane, he and his crew remained optimistic about other searches. In addition to publishing Into the Deep: A Memoir from the Man Who Found Titanic in 2021, cowritten with Christopher Drew, he was featured in the National Geographic channel documentary Bob Ballard: An Explorer's Life that same year.

Significance

Throughout his career, Ballard has participated in more than one 150 expeditions and ventured out in more deep-diving submersibles than anyone else in the world. His explorations have contributed greatly to knowledge of what lies beneath the surface of the oceans. Some discoveries, such as evidence in support of plate tectonic theory or the finding of life near hydrothermal vents on the ocean floor, were primarily of interest to other scientists and were presented in dozens of articles Ballard contributed to scientific journals. Ballard’s discovery of the Titanic and the other lost ships thrilled people all over the world—both scientists and nonspecialists alike—in part because of his talent for making science and technology accessible to general audiences. Ballard has written or cowritten more than a dozen books (including a juvenile biography and a children’s pop-up book), as well as magazine articles and television programs.

Ballard has also made great technological contributions, helping develop and refine submersibles, underwater video cameras, and robots to hold and move the cameras. Through his writing, speaking, and photography, and through the “telepresence” of the JASON Project and the work of the Ocean Exploration Trust, Ballard shared his discoveries with the world. In 2024, Ballard was named a recipient of the Horatio Alger Award for encouraging youth to pursue their dreams of higher education.

Bibliography

"About: Our Founder; Dr. Robert Ballard." Nautilus Live, Ocean Exploration Trust, nautiluslive.org/about/founder. Accessed 5 June 2024.

Allen, Christina G., et al, eds. Talking with Adventurers: Conversations with Christina Allen, Robert Ballard, Michael Blakey, Ann Bowles, David Doubilet, Jane Goodall, Dereck and Beverly Joubert, Michael Novacek, Johan Reinhard, Rick West, and Juris Zarins. National Geographic Society, 1998.

Ballard, Robert D., and Rick Archbold. The Lost Ships of Robert Ballard. Thunder Bay Press, 2005.

Ballard, Robert D. Return to Midway. National Geographic Society, 1999.

Ballard, Robert D., with Will Hively. The Eternal Darkness: A Personal History of Deep-Sea Exploration. Princeton UP, 2000.

Ballard, Robert D., with Malcolm McConnell. Explorations: My Quest for Adventure and Discovery Under the Sea. Hyperion, 1995.

"Dr. Robert Ballard, Renowned Oceanographer and Marine Geologist, to Receive 2024 Horatio Alger Award." Horatio Alger Association of Distinguished Americans, 6 Feb. 2024, horatioalger.org/news-events/news/dr-robert-ballard-renowned-oceanographer-and-marine-geologist-to-receive-2024-horatio-alger-award/. Accessed 20 Aug. 2024.

Hartigan, Rachel. "He Found the Titanic, but for Robert Ballard the Search Never Ends." National Geographic, 15 Apr. 2021, www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/article/he-found-the-titanic-but-for-robert-ballard-the-search-never-ends-feature. Accessed 20 Aug. 2024.

Hecht, Jeff. “20,000 Tasks Under the Sea.” New Scientist, vol. 147, 1995, pp. 40–45.

"Robert D. Ballard." Graduate School of Oceanography, The University of Rhode Island, web.uri.edu/gso/meet/robert-d-ballard/. Accessed 20 Aug. 2024.