Friday, May 9, 2008
The man who discovered the wreck of the Titanic says he's driven by "a childish desire to poke around."
Jul 24, 2001 | If it's underwater and it's lost, Robert Ballard will look for it. Since the 1970s, the undersea explorer has participated in more than 110 expeditions, searching for everything from sunken ships and buried treasures to the Loch Ness monster. He's found the wrecks of the RMS Titanic, the German battleship Bismarck and the American aircraft carrier USS Yorktown, and explored sunken luxury liners including the Lusitania, the Andrea Doria and the Brittanic.
He has never found Nessie, but we get the picture: Ballard finds ships. Ships galore. What drives someone to spend so much time at the bottom of the world, trapped under tons of water in complete darkness? Is he shy? He might be. Agoraphobic? He could be. Or is he just plain crazy?
In his 1987 book, "The Discovery of the Titanic," Ballard wrote: "My childhood idols were imaginary explorers at the technological frontiers of science -- people like Jules Verne's Captain Nemo and his Nautilus. As long as I can remember, I've been enthralled by the sea. But I've always been more interested in what goes on underneath the waves than on the surface."
In a 1997 PBS interview Ballard said: "The ocean was my friend -- my best friend. And I wanted to be the first kid to put footprints on the sand after a tide. I loved the story of Robinson Crusoe, walking this deserted beach, finding treasures that had been washed up. And I've never grown up. I mean, I still have that childish desire to poke around."
And Ballard has been poking around for decades, racking up one successful expedition after another, in almost every ocean on Earth. A few he's crossed off his list are the Atlantic Ocean, Pacific Ocean, Black Sea, Red Sea, Mediterranean Sea, Tyrrhenian Sea, Sea of Cortez, Lake Ontario, Loch Ness, Amazon River and Kuban River (in Russia). After almost 40 years of exploration, he's running out of bodies of water to explore.
For almost two months, I've tried ceaselessly to interview Ballard, with no success. He is always "on travel" or "at home with his family" or "on a book tour with National Geographic" or "on travel" again. As difficult as he is to reach, it's tempting to think that perhaps Ballard doesn't really exist, or that he mysteriously disappeared several years ago and his name is now nothing more than a front for a large, faceless corporation: trademarked, incorporated, copyrighted, licensed, patented and protected. His assistants have assistants, who have secretaries. He's that busy.
Born in 1942 in Wichita, Kan., Robert Ballard grew up in San Diego, just a few miles from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. He was a high school student when the Trieste, a two-man U.S. Navy bathyscaph, left its San Diego port in 1959, to plumb the Marianas trench, the deepest part of the Pacific Ocean. It took the two crewmen more than five hours in the cramped bathyscaph to descend 36,198 feet to the bottom of the trench. It was a journey that can be summarized as follows: darkness, darkness, fish ... darkness, darkness, weird fish ... darkness. The farther you go, the darker it gets and the weirder the fish become, until finally you're so deep that there is no longer any light and almost no species of fish that can survive the extreme conditions.
This probably doesn't sound too appealing to most of us and, to some of us, it may sound like torture, but to Ballard it was the perfect job description. Eight years later, schooling completed, he entered the U.S. Navy and was assigned to the Deep Submergence Laboratory at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute in Cape Cod, Mass.
During his 30-year stint there, Ballard made what is probably his most famous discovery: the RMS Titanic, resting on a shelf in 12,500 feet of water, 1,000 miles east of Boston. Ballard and his team used a device called the Argo -- designed by Ballard -- to search the ocean floor for any signs of wreckage or debris from the Titanic, which sank in 1912.
Like a deep-sea Swiss Army knife, the Argo, sporting an array of gadgets, is thrown overboard and trawled beneath a research vessel to map the seafloor below as researchers make gridlike passes above. It has night-vision video cameras, a color camera, an echo sounder and a side-scan sonar system that can survey areas 300 meters wide in just one pass.
On Sept. 1, 1985, after searching for almost a week, Ballard's team glimpsed some rusted boilers on the seafloor on the video monitors. Slowly, more than two-and-a-half miles below the surface, the Argo passed over the Titanic's extensive debris field: A silver-plated soup tureen, shoes, serving platters, corked wine bottles and pieces of coal littered the ocean floor in a long trail. Finally, rising sharply from the ocean floor like a ruined city was the wreck of the ship, lying in three pieces, rusted, with fish swimming its corroded hallways.
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