Robert D. Ballard

Biography from Current Biography (1986) Copyright (c) by The H. W. Wilson Company. All rights reserved. Ballard, Robert D. June 30, 1942- Marine geologist; undersea explorer.

In the seventy-four years since the fabled steamship Titanic went down in the North Atlantic after striking an iceberg, any number of adventurers, salvage experts, and treasure hunters have launched expeditions in search of the wreckage. But where they had consistently failed, on September 1, 1985, a team of French and American scientists, headed by Dr. Robert D. Ballard of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, succeeded. Although Ballard had long dreamed of locating the Titanic, its discovery was more a gratifying episode than a turning point in his distinguished scientific career. Part explorer, part geologist, part oceanographer, and perhaps most important, part engineer, he is the designer of the underwater survey sleds that, over the past decade, have greatly increased the scope of deep submergence exploration. Ballard himself has taken part in more than 100 dives to the ocean floor and has spent more time there, observing and mapping, than any other marine researcher. His oceanographic finds include the hydrothermal vents in the Mid-Ocean Ridge and their unique animal communities. Robert Duane Ballard was born on June 30, 1942 in Wichita, Kansas, one of the three children of Chester Patrick and Harriet Nell (May) Ballard. Shortly thereafter, the family moved to southern California, where Chester Ballard worked as a flight engineer at the federal government's aircraft testing ground in the Mojave Desert. The sights and sounds of jet planes screaming into the sky are among Robert Ballard's earliest memories. It was not until the 1950s, after the elder Ballard had been appointed the United States Navy's representative to the Scripps Institution of Oceanography that young Robert fell in love with the ocean. He spent most of his free time on the beach, fishing and bodysurfing, but he also enjoyed reading about the adventures of his boyhood idols, Osa and Martin Johnson, the explorers and authors whose photographic expeditions to the South Pacific and Africa in the 1930s and 1940s spawned a series of popular books. Following his high school graduation, Ballard attended the University of California at Santa Barbara. On receiving his B.S. degree in chemistry and geology in 1965, he applied to the Scripps Institution of Oceanography for graduate study. Denied admission there because he lacked a knowledge of physics, he enrolled instead at the Institute of Geophysics at the University of Hawaii. Supporting himself by tending two trained porpoises at Sea Life Park, he studied oceanography at the institute for a year, then returned to the mainland to continue his training at the University of Southern California. From 1965 to 1967 he also served a two-year tour of duty in the United States Army's intelligence unit. Commissioned as a lieutenant, j.g., in the United States Navy in 1967, he was assigned to the Office of Naval Research in Boston as its liaison officer with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, a private, nonprofit marine research establishment on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. When his naval appointment ended in 1969, Ballard decided to stay on at Woods Hole as a research associate in ocean engineering. He was promoted to assistant scientist in 1974, associate scientist in 1976, and senior scientist in 1983. Shortly after he arrived at Woods Hole, Ballard happened to hear Patrick M. Hurley, a geology professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, give a lecture on plate tectonics, the study of the movement of the earth's crustal plates. The concepts of plate tectonics, including the notion that the continents are still moving apart, seemed "outlandish" and "bizarre" to Ballard at the time, but he was sufficiently intrigued by the theory to make it the subject of his doctoral studies in marine geology and geophysics at the University of Rhode Island. On submission of his dissertation, in which he sought to explain the present shape of New England and its offshore areas in terms of the shifting movements of the American, African, and European plates hundreds of millions of years ago, Ballard received his Ph.D. degree in 1974. In January 1972, while completing work on his doctorate, Ballard attended an international conference of earth scientists at Princeton University. The chief topic of discussion was the exploration of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, the Atlantic portion of the underwater mountain chain, known as the Mid-Ocean Ridge, that girdles the globe. Long interested in submarine engineering as well as in marine geology, Ballard proposed using manned, deep-sea submersibles in the proposed expedition--a suggestion that was met with more than a little derision, particularly from the geophysicists. Ballard, however, was undeterred by the skeptics. Back in the laboratory at Woods Hole, which receives one-quarter of its funding from the Navy, he participated in the development of the Navy's new submersible, the Alvin, a deep-sea, three-man submarine equipped with a remote-controlled mechanical arm for collecting specimens from the ocean floor. The Alvin was to play a major role in Project FAMOUS, an acronym for French-American Mid-Ocean Undersea Study. Launched in the summer of 1974, Project FAMOUS, which was part of a global geodynamics study, had as its objective the examination of a section of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge southwest of the Azores. Over a two-month period in the summer of 1974, the four ships and three research submersibles, including the Alvin, that comprised the Project FAMOUS task force crisscrossed the area, mapping the ocean floor, taking thousands of photographs of the suboceanic terrain, and collecting geological samples for later analysis. The Alvin made seventeen dives to the ocean bottom, averaging close to five hours on the sea floor on each descent. The dive sites were pinpointed by the scientists after a careful examination of the reconnaissance photographs taken by the acoustically navigated survey sled Angus, which Ballard had designed. Ballard himself was on board the Alvin for most of its dives and was thus able to see at firsthand the great central rift created by the pulling apart of the continental plates that form the eastern and western sides of the Atlantic seabed. The boundary is marked by incessant "micro-earthquakes," a network of cracks and fissures, and abundant lava flows. In addition to its value as a geological expedition, the intensive study of the rift by the Project FAMOUS team yielded a wealth of information that had immediate practical applications in such areas as earthquake prediction and the discovery of offshore petroleum and mineral deposits. In the winter of 1975-76, many of the scientists involved in Project FAMOUS followed up their pioneering exploration of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge with an expedition to the Cayman Trough, a 24,- 000-foot-deep gash in the sea floor just south of Cuba that is believed to be the line of demarcation between the North American and Caribbean plates. As chief scientist of the joint French-American mission, Ballard directed a team of skilled divers and marine geologists in a series of dives in the Alvin and in the Navy's bathyscaphe Trieste, which could descend to far greater depths than the Alvin. A sophisticated new technique of recording echo soundings across a wide swath of the ocean bottom not only furnished the raw data for the first accurate map of the area, but also acted as the submersibles' "eyes." Ballard, who is, by his own admission, as much a "romanticist" as a scientist, took part in all of the dives into the Cayman Trough. He described his reactions during one dive aboard the Alvin in an article for National Geographic (August 1976) magazine: "I stare out of my view port at the black, manganese-coated outcrop just two meters away. It is hard to realize that in front of us lie rock layers from deep within earth's crust that never before have been seen or sampled in place in the sea. Just then a large pink octopod flies by my port, upstaging the geologic importance of the moment....The excitement of my first dive to Alvin's 12,000-foot limit..., the chance encounter with a strange and rare marine form, all cause me to forget momentarily why we are here. Instead, I imagine what it would be like to live in this alien world of eternal darkness." For both the romantic and the scientist in Ballard, the Cayman Trough expedition surpassed all expectations. Among other things, the scientists found evidence of recent volcanic activity on the sea floor, just as they had predicted. Perhaps more important, they used the Alvin's mechanical arm to collect rock samples from the upper mantle of the earth's crust, the deepest layer of rock ever to be sampled in place in the seabed. A year later, Ballard signed on with the Galapagos Hydrothermal Expedition, which was sponsored by the National Science Foundation as part of the International Decade of Ocean Exploration. Headed by John B. Corliss of Oregon State University, the Galapagos research team set out to investigate the mysterious variations in the sea-floor water temperature detected by an earlier scientific expedition to the Galapagos Rift, west of Ecuador. Ballard and Corliss suspected that the variations were caused by hydrothermal vents, deep-sea spouts of mineral-rich water issuing from volcanic cracks in the earth's crust. To test their theory at the site, Ballard and his colleagues aboard the research vessel Knorr lowered into the water the camera-sled Angus, to which they had attached a highly sensitive thermistor. Whenever the thermistor registered a sharp rise in temperature, the Angus' cameras automatically photographed the area. To the scientists' astonishment, the developed photographs showed large communities of crabs, tube worms, and giant clams clustered around the hydrothermal vents. As Ballard and Corliss observed in an article for the National Geographic (October 1977), every other known ecosystem on earth derives its energy from the process of photosynthesis in green plants; these remarkable creatures, apparently thriving in the perpetual darkness of the ocean depths, rely on chemosynthesis for their energy. "[We made] history for marine biology," the two scientists wrote. "The unknown creatures and dense communities of life we have discovered living at these vents, like lush oases in a sunless desert, are a phenomenon totally new to science." In 1979 Ballard and his experienced team of scientists and divers returned to the Galapagos Rift, accompanied by several biologists and a National Geographic film crew. The resulting National Geographic television special, Dive to the Edge of Creation, which was first broadcast by PBS in January 1980, examined the process of chemosynthesis, as it could be observed in the marine population living near the Galapagos Rift's hydrothermal vents, and suggested that it might be a rough model for the emergence of life on earth. That theory gained credence during another 1979 expedition, to the Mid-Ocean Ridge off the coast of Baja California. There, Ballard discovered twenty-foot tall natural "chimneys," pouring out hot, dark, chemical-laden smoke and, gathered around each chimney, a variety of unusual life forms, including tiny white crabs and ten-inch-long fish, which, with the assistance of sulfide-eating bacteria, fed on the effluents. His own passionate interest in submarine diving notwithstanding, Ballard has always been mindful of the fact that manned undersea exploration is both expensive and relatively unproductive. For example, the Alvin, arguably the most useful of the handful of deep-sea manned submersibles, can make, at most, 110 dives a year. The remainder of the time is spent in travel to and from dive sites, in maintenance and repairs, and in resupplying its extensive surface support system. Convinced that cost-efficient, unmanned submersibles with state-of-the-art robotic equipment could contribute substantially to deep-sea exploration, Ballard began working on a design for such a research submersible in the early 1980s. With financial support from the Office of Naval Research, he developed over the next few years the Argo-Jason system. Able to descend to depths of 20,000 feet, the Argo is essentially a sixteen-foot-long cage equipped with strobe lights, side-scanning sonar devices, and computer-enhanced underwater cameras. When its sensors detect an especially interesting area, the Jason, a smaller, self-propelled robot tethered to the Argo, can be deployed to collect samples with its mechanical arms. As he explained in an article for Oceans (March 1983), Ballard hoped that the Argo- Jason system would "ultimately eliminate the need for a human presence on the seafloor." To test the capabilities of the new system, Ballard proposed undertaking a search for the wreckage of the Titanic. His interest in the sunken luxury liner, which had been stimulated many years before by his friendship with William Harris Tantum 4th, then the head of the Titanic Historical Society, eventually became, by his own account, an "obsession," as he pored over various records and contemporary accounts of the disaster. Having persuaded the United States Navy, which had bankrolled the research and development of the Argo-Jason system, that the search for the Titanic would be an adequate sea trial for the vehicles, Ballard recruited a team of American and French marine scientists and organized an expedition to the area of the Titanic's last-known location. On June 28, 1985, French sonar experts aboard the Suroit, a survey vessel operated by the Paris-based Institute for Research and Exploitation of the Sea, began sweeping the fifteen-mile-square search area in a back-and-forth pattern that Ballard later compared to "mowing the lawn." By the time the Knorr, with the Argo and the Angus onboard, arrived on the scene in late August, the Suroit had already covered 80 percent of the target area and had picked up several promising sonar echoes. Ballard immediately deployed the Argo to investigate. Less than a week later, on September 1, as Ballard told an interviewer for Canadian television, "We went smack-dab over a gorgeous boiler. It was just bang, there we were on top of it." Over the next few days, the Argo and the Angus made numerous passes over and around the Titanic's hulk, which was resting, nearly upright and mostly intact, more than two miles below sea level. Between them, the two camera sleds took hundreds of feet of videotape and thousands of still photographs. Although the ship was covered with a light dusting of sediment--"as if it had been snowing for a couple of hours," according to Ballard--the images of the Titanic and of the debris, including luggage, wine bottles, silver trays, and china dinner plates, scattered around it were surprisingly sharp. "We could see a tremendous amount of detail, down to the rivets," Ballard said later, as quoted in Newsweek (September 16, 1985). To ward off scavengers and treasure hunters, Ballard attempted to keep the Titanic's exact location a secret, but just as the Knorr was preparing to leave the area a private plane circled overhead, marking the position. Almost immediately, several salvage experts announced plans to raise the ship. Strongly opposed to any commercial exploitation of the liner, Ballard proposed instead that the site be declared an international memorial. "The Titanic lies now in 13,000 feet of water on a gently sloping, Alpine-looking countryside overlooking a small canyon below...," he told reporters at a news conference in Woods Hole on September 9, 1985. "There is no light at this great depth and little life can be found. It is a quiet and peaceful place--and a fitting place for the remains of this greatest of sea tragedies to rest. Forever may it remain that way." Ballard returned to the wreckage site in July 1986 as the leader of an expedition, sponsored by the United States Navy, designed to test the capabilities of Jason Jr., a self- propelled underwater robot camera. With Jason Jr. serving as a "swimming eyeball," he and two colleagues on board the submersible Alvin explored the Titanic from stem to stern. As Dr. Ballard told reporters at a news conference at the National Geographic Society in Washington, D.C. on July 30, 1986, the bow section was still "majestic," but the severed and mangled stern "looked violent and destructive." To his surprise, he found "absolutely no evidence" of the 300-foot-long gash the iceberg had reportedly torn along the ship's starboard side. Dr. Ballard has suggested that the impact of the collision caused the steel plates in the ship's hull to buckle, opening seams that allowed water to flood in. The discovery of the Titanic demonstrated beyond question the capabilities of the Argo and, in Ballard's view, ushered in "a new era of underseas exploration." The most technologically advanced craft of its kind, the Argo has a wide range of scientific and military uses, from locating lost submarines to investigating the possibility of basing missiles on the ocean floor. Capitalizing on the successes of the underwater survey systems he had designed for the Navy, Ballard founded, in 1983, Deep Ocean Search and Survey, Inc. of Woods Hole to develop similar crafts and sell them to governments and to private industry. As of September 1985, the firm had reportedly sold two research submersibles similar in design to the Angus. Eager to report the results of his research to the general public "whose tax dollars paid for the expeditions," Ballard has given countless talks to various civic and educational groups across the country, and he frequently appears on television. He is also the author of dozens of magazine articles and of the book Exploring Our Living Planet (National Geographic, 1983), a lavishly illustrated explanation of plate tectonics. His growing reputation as a "science popularizer" has prompted harsh criticism from some of his scientific colleagues. "I know some scientists think of Carl Sagan and Jacques Cousteau as publicity hounds because of their TV shows and all that...," he told Bayard Webster in an interview for the New York Times (December 28, 1982). "But look at the good they've done by making science exciting and making people aware of it!" "Besides," he added, "I feel it's responsible to go to...the public and tell them what I'm doing." Dr. Robert D. Ballard stands a lean six feet two inches tall and has sandy hair and the tanned, weathered complexion of a lifelong outdoorsman. A compulsive worker, he has been described by his associates at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution as an "impatient" and "driven" man, but one with "vision." The scientist and his wife, the former Marjorie Constance Jacobsen, a medical receptionist whom he married on July 1, 1966, live in Hatchville, Massachusetts with their two sons, Todd Alan and Douglas Matthew. Dr. Ballard has received a number of awards and honors, including the Compass Distinguished Achievement Award from the Marine Technology Society, in 1977, the Cutty Sark Science Award from Science Digest, in 1982, the Newcomb Cleveland Prize from the American Association for the Advancement of Science, for the best scientific paper published in a journal of science in 1981, and the Washburn Award from the Boston Museum of Science, in 1986. In July 1985, he was one of four scientists to be awarded a Secretary of the Navy Research Chair in Oceanography, which carries with it an $800,000 grant.