Robert Ballard Interview (page: 4 / 8) Discoverer of the Titanic	Print Interview

When the Navy got you, they got a trained marine geologist. They sent you to the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. What was that like? What did they put you to work doing?

Robert Ballard: Woods Hole is the most incredible organization I have ever worked with. You don't work for it, you work with it. Woods Hole is the wild west underwater, as far as I'm concerned. It's a non-profit, but private, institution. When you first come here, they sort of put two guns to your head. One is: up or out on the tenure track. You start here as a young Ph.D., and then you have eight or ten years to make tenure. Eighty percent don't make it. I got tenure in 1980. Now, once you get tenure, they take one gun away, but that other one is always there, and that means you have to fund yourself. They don't fund me; I pay them to be here. I rent their flag, if you will. I do expeditions under their name, but I have to raise the money, so I have to be an entrepreneur.

When you first went there, the Navy was paying your salary, right?

Robert Ballard: I was the Navy's liaison officer for the first three of my 23 years at Woods Hole. I thought I had finished my Navy career in 1970, when I went back to graduate school to finish my Ph.D. I came back aboard Woods Hole as a scientist, but the Navy put be back in several years ago. I'm a commander in the United States Navy.

Did the Navy put you to work experimenting with new equipment? Where did you begin experimenting? Was it then?

Robert Ballard: No. My first brush with exploration technology was when I was in high school. My father helped me get a job at North American Aviation, in a new budding group called the Ocean Systems Group. They were bidding on a contract to build a submarine for the academic community. This was 1962, and that submarine was ALVIN. I was 19 years old, and I was able to actually work as a small person, a little cog in a big machine. They didn't get the contract, but that was my introduction to deep submergence. The first time that I ever dove in a submarine was as a naval officer here at Woods Hole. When I left the Navy and got my doctorate, I was still in the ALVIN program. I've continued to dive, to this day.

When you began diving in ALVIN with the Navy, what was the purpose of those dives? Were you taking that submarine down to see if it would crack in two, or catch on fire? Was this a dangerous thing?

Robert Ballard: In the early years of the ALVIN program there was a lot of danger. The first years of deep submergence were to de-bug it, and make it work as a system, so it became routine. In the early years, there was a lot of apprehension about a deep dive: Was everything going to work? Were you going to come back? As you did it over and over again, it became real routine.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Like the space shuttle, you could never lose sight of the fact that you were doing something dangerous. It may be apparently routine, but if you mess up, it will bite you, and it has over the years. I had a fire once -- not in ALVIN, in a French bathyscaphe -- at 9,000 feet, and almost died. I crashed into the side of a volcano at 20,000 feet and almost died. I got stuck in a crack for hours and almost died. Now I don't mean that it's really risky. It's probably safer than flying from here to La Guardia. Those planes fall out of the sky, and they crash and burn, and I suspect more people per hours have actually died in airplanes than in deep submergence. Only one person has ever died in a deep submersible, only one.

[ Key to Success ] Courage

Up to the 1980s, your expeditions were all about searching for scientific data. You made discoveries that were helpful in solving certain scientific problems. You went after the famous sunken ships after you developed the Argo-Jason system. What was the reason for that change?

Robert Ballard: I used ALVIN until I was convinced that there was a better mouse trap. We were starting to reach diminishing returns with our technology. I was up for tenure; it was a cross-roads in my life. I wanted to get out and stand back and look at it and think about it. Otherwise, I'd just keep going on without any thought. So I said, I'm going to get out of the submarine and decompress. I'm going to not dive for a year, I'm going to go to Stanford and sit on a mountain and think about it.

So in 1980, I was teaching geophysics at Stanford as a sabbatical. That's when I dreamed up the Argo-Jason system. Then I had to come back and convince someone to fund it, which is a story unto itself. It did not occur the way it was supposed to occur, because things never occur the way they're supposed to occur.

But I finally convinced a person, the Secretary of the Navy, John Lehman, that he ought to bet on me, and he did. The Navy funded the Argo-Jason system. He was that type of person I described, who knew enough, just looking me in the eye. I sent the right message to him, and he said, "Do it."

What do you think the message was that he received, as the representative of the Navy?

Robert Ballard: I had paid my dues, and I had succeeded. I knew what I was talking about. I was sincerely committed to it. I really wanted to do it, it was important, and I could do it. So he said, "You can't ask for much more, go do it." He authorized the program, and I went and did it.

From the standpoint of advancing scientific knowledge, which of your accomplishments are you most proud of?

Robert Ballard: I would say the discovery of the hydrothermal vents off the Galápagos Islands. That really turned science upside down. Until that time, there were a lot of things we didn't know about the ocean. We didn't know why it was salty. We didn't know why it had the chemistry that it had.

The most obvious way minerals come into the sea is from rivers. The problem is: when you compare a bucket of water from the ocean with a bucket of water from a major river like the Amazon, the chemistries don't make sense. It wasn't until we found these underwater hot thermal springs that we discovered the ocean itself is going inside the earth and out every six million years. The whole volume of the world's oceans actually goes inside the earth, and we never knew that. Once we learned that, we could finally make sense of the chemistry of the sea, and make all of our mass balance equations balance for the first time. That was exciting.

Plus the animals that we found living in these hot springs turned the world upside down. We discovered the first major ecosystem ever found that does not live off the energy of the sun, but the energy of the earth itself. This changes all those thoughts about how life began on our planet. It changes the thoughts about the potential for life on other planets. You don't have to have a sun nearby. You can live off the energy of the planet itself. It's called chemosynthesis. Little bacteria, thermophilic bacteria, figured out how to replicate photosynthesis in the dark, how to fix carbon and start a food chain.

What do these creatures look like?

Robert Ballard: Pretty gross, actually. There are worms that are eight feet long and, if you cut them, they bleed like a human. There are clams that are a foot across but when you open them, they look like liver. Bizarre fish. It's like that movie where they descended into a volcano and found another world, but this was real.

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