‘We’ll Make You All Explorers’
Robert Ballard has spent a major portion of his life undersea, participating in 115 expeditions with both manned and unmanned submersibles. He is most famous for discovering the wreck of the Titanic, but he also discovered hydrothermal vents in the depths of the oceans and a host of ships, including the Lusitania and the Bismarck.
He spoke recently with The Times about his experiences and goals.
Q: How did you start using robotic submersibles?
Ballard: Around 1979, I began to question the utility of manned submarines and felt that we should shift to robotics. I took a sabbatical to Stanford and I began to design the Argo-Jason system--that was the first tele-operated robotic system. Ironically, my first test expedition was the Titanic. . . . Quite honestly, the Titanic was a cover for classified military purposes: to go inside the Thresher [a lost U.S. nuclear-powered submarine] and find the nuclear weapons that were on it. Little Jason Jr., which went inside the Titanic, was really designed to go inside the forward torpedo room of the Scorpion [another lost U.S. submarine], but they kept it under wraps.
[The Navy] was after the reactors from the Thresher and the Scorpion. Back in 1985, 1986, everyone was debating disposing of nuclear containment vessels from nuclear submarines in the ocean, which the Russians had been doing. And so the U.S. Navy said, “Wait a minute, we’ve got two down there already. Let’s go see what they are doing.” They funded me to build this technology on the understanding that I would use it for them too. And then I went down and found the reactors. In fact, the first man-made thing I saw on the ocean floor was the Thresher. It was from mapping the Thresher that I realized how to find ships, because the Thresher had imploded and then fell, but the currents carried the debris in this huge, long trail. That gave me the idea of how to search for the Titanic, which was to look for the trail of debris. That’s how I found the Titanic. But the key came from the Thresher, and at the time it was all classified, so I couldn’t say anything.
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Q: Are you still in the Navy?
Ballard: I left the Navy [in August]. I resigned my commission after 30 years. I was a commander. I resisted promotion because I wanted to be a commander forever. You’re not welcome on a submarine if you are a captain. I was the oldest commander the Navy ever had, I think. I resigned because . . . I finally concluded that the Cold War really, really was over. And it’s time to move on.
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Q: What wrecks do you really want to find?
Ballard: I’d like to do the battle of Jutland [between the British and German fleets in World War I]. Kublai Khan’s invasion fleet would be cool. They were sunk northwest of Japan in a great typhoon [in 1281] that the Japanese called a kamikaze [divine wind]. The [Sung] emperor’s fleet that sunk off Macao with the entire treasury of China in 1276. [Sir Ernest Henry] Shackleton’s ship the Endurance [sunk after being trapped in the ice off Antarctica in 1915], that’s my next mission. I’m going down to the Weddell Sea in February. That’s going to be challenging because it’s in 9,000 feet of water. It’s got an ice canopy you have to break through. But they can break through 21 feet of ice. That will be a good one because there are no woodborers down there.
I also want to go up with another [National Geographic Society] explorer in residence, Johan Reinhard, the guy that found the frozen sacrificial Inca children up in the top of the Andes. He’s convinced that, near Machu Picchu, the Incas knew the Spaniards were coming, put their treasury in a depression and rerouted a river to form a lake. And the conquistadors couldn’t bring it up. He’s got pretty good data on that. That would be interesting.
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Q: Now you are searching for antiquities?
Ballard: Because I am convinced there is more history in the deep sea than in all the museums of the world combined. People have this concept that the ocean is remote. But 12,000 feet, the average depth of the ocean, is only the distance from the Oval Office to the Pentagon. It isn’t far. It’s two different worlds, but it’s not far.
If you look at the January issue of National Geographic, we found two Phoenician ships from the time of Homer, 750 BC. And these ships are just parked down there. You have to realize that in the deep sea, the average rate of sedimentation is a centimeter per millennium. That’s the average rate of burial in the deep sea.
Modern scholars say the ancient scholars were wrong, that the ancient mariners hugged the coastline and they did not make these voyages [across open water]. We’re finding . . . they did, that they knew what a straight line was, and that they were businessmen and they wanted to get from A to B. My first expedition, I took a ruler and drew a straight line between Ostia, which is the port of Rome, and Carthage [on the north coast of Africa]. I drove on it, and 110 miles out to sea I found the largest concentration of Roman ships ever discovered. The second one, I drew a straight line between Ashkelon [near Gaza] and Alexandria, at the mouth of the Nile, and found the Phoenician ships, way beyond the sight of land. The point is, they were very bold people and they lost their ships in deep water.
Working with Harvard, we estimate there’s a million ships of antiquity in the deeps.
A million ships.
It’s based upon a lot of historical data. Rome, just in the Tyrrhenian Sea, lost--and it’s been documented--10,000 ships. The ancients were losing about 3% of their shipping. . . . Multiply 3% of shipping times thousands of years, you get a lot of ships.
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Q: Why do you prefer not to recover artifacts, such as from the Titanic?
Ballard: One of the biggest problems we have is conservation, preservation in perpetuity. You bring up these amphoras or whatever, and they’re pressure-impregnated with salt. You let the water start to evaporate, those crystals grow and you destroy the pottery. So we have to desalinate all the pottery. It takes months and bucks. You take a $19 amphora, and by the time we’re done with it, it’s a multi-thousand-dollar amphora. And then you have to uniformly dry it inside and outside under high humidity so you don’t get any differential stress and cracking. And by the time you’re done, you say, do I want to do every amphora like this? No, leave it down there. So what we do is we build storage facilities down there.
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Q: You are actually building storage facilities?
Ballard: They’re trenches. There is a black market in artifacts. And we actually have fishermen who go out trawling for them, and they destroy most of the artifacts with their nets. So what you want to do is trench and then put the artifacts in trenches so the nets go over the top of them. We’re thinking of bringing tank traps, from World War II, to guard ships from trawlers. [We] have already begun doing this. Not the tank traps yet, but we’ve been storing things. We did it on the Phoenician ships and we did it on the Roman ships. We mark them with GPS, they’re not lost.
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Q: What else are you doing now?
Ballard: The thing I’m doing next is in the Monterey Bay Marine Sanctuary, where we are installing a vehicle system that you can control from a theater. NOAA [the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration] has created these marine sanctuaries in Monterey Bay, the Channel Islands, the Florida Keys, etc.
But what’s a marine sanctuary if you can’t get to it? We’re wiring them up so that you can do guided tours through tele-presence. We’re building a spherical room at Mystic, Conn., at my place, and we’re putting in a T3 line, all the way from Monterey Bay to Mystic. We’re putting in wire-guided, high-quality video camera systems which you can drive, pan, choke and zoom, and you can then go through a guided tour of Monterey Bay every half hour at our place, where we have a million visitors a year. Eventually, all the sanctuaries will be visitable.
It’s a building block toward a much bigger thing.
My vision is that, you’re in your home, on the Internet with a T3 line, in a personal Omnimax theater that’s all fiber-optic, and you’re renting robots from Hertz to go wherever you want: the Serengeti, the Titanic, the moon, to Mars, wherever you want to go. Electronic travel. I see you going to the Arctic and doing your own thing in an environment where you can’t hurt the Arctic. . . . We’ll make you all explorers. I’ve been there, and I want you to go.
It’s really neat to go where no one has been before. I’ve spent most of my life on pieces of the Earth where I was the first human being to be there, and I want to share that.
