The questions posed to Dr. Robert Ballard as he approached the podium of a big meeting room in the Northern Trust Bank on the 86th anniversary of a very important tragedy were simple:
Is Robert Ballard the great ship Titanic’s last victim?
Is telling that story over and over again the price he must pay for finding and visiting the wreckage in 12,000 feet of water? Will this define the rest of his life?
Is he some kind of scientific Ancient Mariner compelled to drag people by the arm and tell them long tales about what really happened to Titanic?
It is easy to see how anyone could respond “yes” to each one. Eighty-six years after it sank, Titanic is a big cultural event again, partly because of the staying power of its own story and partly because of the popularity of a movie so compelling that an enormous number of people went to see it even though they all knew quite well how it would end.
The real answers to those questions?
No. No. No. And no. Most definitely.
Ballard’s discovery in the murky depths of the Atlantic on Sept. 1, 1985, brought the story of the Titanic to life again. The videos and pictures he collected, distributed and broadcast through National Geographic gave unimaginable texture and reality to a disaster that had worked its way deep into popular mythology.
But he isn’t done yet, and even though history will forever note he was the man who found the lost ocean liner, he has bigger challenges on his plate now. He has not wasted a minute of time over the past decade.
Although he is building a new home in Mystic, Conn., he still likes the idea of going to sea, particularly when he is out there bouncing around on the waves and absorbed by some seemingly insurmountable challenge. But he is 55 and eager to spend more time with his wife, who heads their video production company, and his two children.
He has some plans.
Searching for the Yorktown
He will go to the bottom of the Black Sea next year — no one has ever been there before — in a search for the clues to a civilization that was most likely lost in what might have been the biblical Great Flood. He will also go to the Pacific to find the remains of the U.S. carrier Yorktown and a collection of Japanese carriers sunk during World War II’s epic Battle of Midway.
He went to the bottom of the Mediterranean a year ago in the U.S. Navy’s NR-1 deep diving submarine to find the remains of Roman cargo ships that went down some 2,000 years ago. He found the German battleship Bismarck in 1987.
No matter what it is, from gas vents that have created their own environments on the bottom of the sea to historical wreckage and into an undersea world that is so mysterious that no one has any idea what will be found, Ballard wants to be there.
He has helped create the technology that makes this kind of pursuit a lot safer than it was more than three decades ago, when the Wichita, Kan., native packed up his fresh new doctorate from the University of Rhode Island and went to work at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts.
Having spent a lot of time in Alvin, a now vintage deep-diving craft with cramped accommodations for three, he notes it was not really a pleasant place to be. The robotic deep diving system, called ArgoJason (for Jason and the Argonauts, who went in search of the mythical golden fleece), solved that problem.
Its commanders sit topside experiencing the ocean on big television screens while they guide Argo, the mother ship and Jason, its spiffy little robotic search vehicle, in the deep. Jason was the vehicle that actually visited the interior of Titanic, guided by Ballard and his team inside of Alvin, which thumped down on the wreckage’s deck.
Ballard currently is the director of the Center for Marine Exploration at Woods Hole and recently unveiled the “Institute for Exploration,” in Mystic, where all of his undersea adventures have been transformed into multimedia presentations.
He notes that although Titanic got the most attention, it was his 80th undersea discovery during his 35 years as an explorer and oceanographer. Back in Kansas, his mother said she was actually saddened by the Titanic discovery because she realized it would overwhelm his academic achievements.
Ballard spoke recently to an audience packed full of prime Northern Trust Bank customers, whose appetites were so well sated by little bacon-wrapped appetizers, prime rib to die for, cheese thingies on crackers, big fat shrimp and all the fine drink you could guzzle in a one-hour preaddress cocktail reception that they should all have been napping.
But it seemed as though they were all right on the edge of their seats.
Attracting youth to science
With every new slide depicting what Ballard found in 12,000 feet of water, with every anecdote about how he and his team came to discover the wreckage, with every thoughtful comment about the need to draw youngsters into the world of science, there were gasps and applause.
A young teacher was so moved that she approached him with tears running down her cheeks and asked him to sign a collection of papers she wanted to take back to her class. She was so excited about his message she could barely control herself, full of emotion and eager to give thanks for the arrival of a scientist who is not a nerd in any sense of the definition.
Ballard said he and his team found Titanic because they bought into an assumption that the liner broke up before it sank and spilled everything from boilers to wine bottles along a long debris path. Find the debris path and you would find Titanic.
That wasn’t as easy as it sounds. He said he is well acquainted with having to tell sponsors for other missions, “Well, I know where it isn’t,” but technology gave him an edge in the Titanic search. His competitors were searching with sonar, which uses bouncing sound waves to identify objects.
Titanic was 880 feet long and 90 feet wide, very impressive at dockside but virtually nothing down in the terrain of the ocean. The remains of the vessel could easily have slipped between a couple of ocean mountain peaks and avoided sonar detection.
But Ballard’s search used an unmanned vessel that had eyes. Not only could it stay underwater for as long as the crew topside could keep working, but it would be used at first not to look for Titanic, but for debris from the ship.
Once they started seeing debris on the ocean floor, he said, they knew because of what had been recorded about the disaster that they should turn north and go in a straight line. That is how they found the wreckage.
There was a theme beneath the surface of Ballard’s address that was almost as compelling as the story of the search for Titanic.
“You have to get kids by the 4th grade,” he said. “That’s when most of them still love mathematics and science. Once puberty kicks in (about 8th grade) they are gone and you won’t get them back until it’s too late to do much about it.”
Beyond exploring, then, it was clear that one of Ballard’s passions is education.
“We got 16,000 letters from children after the Titanic discovery,” he said. “Essentially, what they all said was, `Next time you go, I want to go along.’ “
So Ballard set up something called “The Jason Project” to help make that happen. Each summer it identifies a different scientific project and takes kids along. It is also linked to some 17,000 science teachers and classrooms all over the country.
“The raw materials for science in the future are all there,” Ballard told the Northern Trust audience. “It is ours to lose. The battle is won or lost by the time a kid gets into the 8th grade.”
He hopes, he said, that after the millennium, politics will stop paying attention to rumors of sex scandals and start paying attention to the status of science education.
For a man who has spent so much of his life in, on and under the water, Ballard has an unusual message about the land. His primary concerns involve the wasting of the land-based environment and the lack of focus on exploring what is here on Earth.
It was easy for the government to spend a fortune on space back when the Soviet-era Sputnik was flying over everyone’s house, he said. It was also a much nicer thought to shoot for the heavens, where the angels are, than for the cold depths of the ocean, that “down there” place that somehow evoked images of hell.
All of that should be changing, he said, as soon as everyone recognizes that this is it, that we will have to live on Earth. Space colonies just won’t do it, and Ballard says the bottom of the ocean is such an unpleasant, murky and muddy place that he can’t imagine why anyone would want to set up colonies there.
