Robert Ballard Interview (page: 5 / 8) Discoverer of the Titanic	Print Interview

In some of your expeditions, you also gained certain knowledge about earthquakes.

Robert Ballard: That's right. We were the first group to ever enter the largest mountain range on our planet, the Mid-Ocean Ridge. This mountain range covers 23 percent of the earth's total surface area. Almost a quarter of our planet is one mountain range, and we didn't even know it existed in its totality until 1960. We had landed on the moon before we had entered this mountain range on earth in 1973. I was fortunate to be one of the first human beings to go into this mountain range.

How deep down was that, and what did you find there?

Robert Ballard: You have to go down about eight to nine thousand feet to enter a deep valley that's called the Rift Valley. In the Atlantic Ocean, it's called the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. You enter the mountain range, go down into this deep valley, and on the floor of this valley are hundreds and hundreds of active volcanoes. There are more earthquakes taking place in the adjoining fault systems of this mountain range than all the earthquakes on land by a factor of probably ten or 100. There are many more volcanoes, belching out molten lava, underneath the ocean than above. But no one knew that. No one had ever gone down there.

Did they belch when you were down there?

Robert Ballard: If they did, we'd be dead. It's like Hawaii; you can go there even though there are recent volcanoes. We have yet to observe one erupt. We know they erupt because we see their products. We know when they're erupting, because we can hear them on our seismic networks. Fortunately we haven't been there when one erupted. There was an expedition recently, where one erupted and the ship vanished. Everyone died. So you've got to be careful around these things.

Did you find any information that would help you predict when we're going to have earthquakes here?

Robert Ballard: The whole objective of earth science, is to understand the earth. I view the earth as a living organism. Now it's very difficult for normal people to view the earth as alive. Let's say you were interviewing a butterfly -- or a Mayfly. A Mayfly lives for four or five days. Say that Mayfly was standing on the branch of a giant Sequoia tree in California, which lives for thousands of years. If you were to ask that Mayfly, "Do you perceive this branch that you are standing on as being alive?" The Mayfly would say, "Of course not. I've been here my entire life, four days, and the branch hasn't done a doggone thing." Yet when you look at the tree in our context, it is very much alive. It started with a seed, and it grew. Well, the earth is very much like that tree, and mankind is very much like that Mayfly. If we are lucky, we will live a hundred years. We are standing on a planet that was born four and a half billion years ago. It looked very different when it was born; it evolved and has changed. Africa used to be just outside the window here. Morocco was connected to Cape Cod. Beneath this building are rocks from Africa. It's hard to imagine that. But if you were to sit on the moon, and look at the earth and blink your eyes once every million years, it would come blossoming to life.

So what we, as scientists, try to do, is to look at its four and one-half billion-year history and see it start as a child, and grow up and become a young adolescent. Some day the earth will probably die, like Mars did, and Venus did, but right now it's a thriving adult. Given that view of the earth as a living, thriving organism, our science, and what we try to do underwater, is to see how the earth does its thing. What it does in this mountain range is create its outer skin, the lithosphere. It does it very systematically.

You've invented new systems to make these discoveries. Would you list those among your accomplishments?

Robert Ballard: There are two aspects of my life as an explorer. You want to go explore, but you need the tools to explore. In my particular field, you can't go down to Sears and Roebuck and buy them. General Motors doesn't build my robots. I have to develop my tools myself. So half of my life is exploring, and the other half is building tools to do it better the next time.

The major innovation that we have developed is to move away from manned exploration, to teleoperated exploration, or remote presence. There has always been this debate in space: do you send an astronaut, or do you send an unmanned space probe? We send a hybrid of both. It's not manned and it's not unmanned. A teleoperated system is robot-controlled, on a second-by-second basis, by human beings. But the human isn't physically there. The average depth of the ocean is 12,000 feet; 50 percent is deeper, 50 percent is shallower. The Titanic, for example, sits at 12,000 feet. It took me two and a half hours to get to the Titanic in the morning, and two and a half hours to get home at night. I had to commute five hours a day to work, and I was only allowed to work for three hours before I had to go back up. What we've done is develop robots that can go down and stay down. They are connected to humans, by a fiber optic tether, and that permits us to explore 24 hours a day. That's been my major technological contribution: to develop the first full remotely operated robotic systems for deep sea exploration.

Lets talk about your first project. This was the one where you explored that mountain range. You found a new form of life down there. It was a very important expedition. Who did you have to go to, to talk to, and convince?

Robert Ballard: I'll never forget that day. Deep submersibles were evolving as a technology, but they hadn't been accepted yet. The geophysical community, the big gurus, viewed it as a toy, a plaything that couldn't possibly do anything important, because it hadn't done anything important up to that point. I remember that the National Academy of Sciences, which is a pretty high-falutin' outfit, had a meeting in Princeton in the early 1970s review our understanding of our planet. The plate tectonic theory had just blasted all over the countryside. It was exciting, but they needed a new phase in higher detail.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. I was a graduate student and K. O. Emery, my mentor, had me present to this august body. Very scary. My knees were knocking. These were all the big gods of the earth. I don't know if you've ever been to Princeton, but they have the old classrooms that are just like an operating pit. You stand there and you look up, and it's sort of intimidating. I got done and a very preeminent scientist -- I won't say who he is, because he is still very preeminent -- stood up and said, "That's cute, but tell me one significant thing a manned submersible has ever done." We hadn't. I didn't have an answer. I was standing there frozen, and another colleague stood up, and he said "That isn't the problem. The technology is not at fault; we haven't dreamed of a way of using them." Out of that came Project Famous, and the first manned expedition.

Your dream encompassed the kind of equipment that you were developing. Right?

Robert Ballard: Manned submersibles are a part of the total thing we had to work on. You can't run around the planet with a manned submersible and a flashlight. You have to go to just the right spot, one where the questions are very important. And if you can answer your questions there, it explains thousands and thousands of square miles of real estate. That's what we had to learn how to do: to focus that technology on the right spot.

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