Robert Ballard: 50 Years Exploring Deep Waters

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Deep-sea voyager Robert Ballard has discovered everything from 10-foot-tall tube worms to the Titanic on his ocean expeditions around the world. Ballard discusses his underwater finds and how new robotic technology allows scientists to explore the sea from ashore. This interview was originally broadcast on July 3, 2009.

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IRA FLATOW, HOST:

You're listening to Science Friday, from NPR News. I am Ira Flatow. My next guest, underwater explorer Robert Ballard. He has probably passed more time on the bottom of the ocean than most of us have probably spent swimming in it. His work day - a typical workday may include a two-and-a-half hour commute each way to the ocean bottom in a cramped submersible. But what he's found down there in five decades of exploration has changed the way we look at the oceans and our planet. Think of the things that he has discovered. You know, he's discovered those hydrothermal vents, the superheated hot springs on the ocean floor, the creatures living there that - they certainly rival any Mariners' tales of monsters or mermaids. We've got those 10 feet-long tube worms, football sized clams with blood red bodies. He's found all kinds of stuff down there, all in the darkness where no one thought any living thing could survive. But he's also made great scientific discoveries as he has, and he's also an underwater archaeologist. And in 1985, Dr. Ballard found the wreck of the Titanic, which is probably the thing he's most famous for but probably not the biggest scientific advance that he's done. He's also -soon after that he found a Nazi warship. And lately, he's been doing other underwater excavations, looking for evidence of ancient civilizations underwater in the Americas, searching for Byzantine merchant ships in the Black Sea. Where is he going next? What's left to find? What kind of new technology is he using? Well for the rest of the hour we're going to be talking about those expeditions with our modern-day Captain Nemo. Robert Ballard is president of the Institute for Exploration. He's Explorer-in-Residence for the National Geographic Society. He's also the director of the Center for Ocean Exploration and Archaeological Oceanography at the University of Rhode Island. And he joins us from Waterford, Connecticut. Welcome back to science Friday, Dr. Ballard.

ROBERT BALLARD: It's a pleasure to be back. It's been awhile.

FLATOW: I think I used up 40 minutes just saying what you've done.

(LAUGHTER)

BALLARD: Well there's a lot left to be done, fortunately.

FLATOW: Do you think of yourself as a, like a modern-day Captain Nemo?

BALLARD: Well, I hope so. I mean, that was my dream as a little kid and it's been my driving engine for years and years. "Twenty-thousand Leagues," as you remember, was not down to the bottom of the ocean, it was driving along the bottom of the ocean in a submarine looking out of that big window, and that's what I'm doing. So I think I might have pulled it off.

FLATOW: When did you first - how young were you? When did you first discover that this was your career, this is was what you wanted to do?

BALLARD: Oh, very early. When I grew up in San Diego, I was a little kid and I lived by the ocean, and that was my play yard. And back then, the parents simply said, you know, get home before it's dark. And I would spend the day in the tidal pools, so I had to learn the tides. And I remember the movie, "Robinson Crusoe" and I wanted to see those footprints of Friday in the sand. So I just began extremely early and then I got a big break when I was in high school. I got - in fact, it was 50 years ago this month - and on my first oceanographic expedition with the Scripps Institute of Oceanography - I had a scholarship there with the - by the National Science Foundation - and we went out and we got in a huge storm. We got hit by a rogue wave and we got rescued by the Coast Guard, and I was 17 and so, you know, too young to realize I was supposed to die. And it was just an incredible experience and I became hooked on going out to sea on expeditions, and in the 50 years since, I've done about 125, 130 and we're getting ready to do it again next month, when we head into the Black Sea in the Mediterranean on our own ship. The first time I've ever had my own ship and guess what its name is? Naturally, we've named it the Nautilus.

FLATOW: Wow - we going to see a TV series on cable with you?

BALLARD: Absolutely. National Geographic television and National Geographic Channel are producing. It's going to take us about two-and-a-half years to produce a series called "Oceanus." And it's going to be about exploration of the world's oceans ...

FLATOW: Oh, did we lose you? I think we lost Dr. Ballard. We'll get him back. 1(800) 989-8255 is our number. We'll get him back on the phone or on our magical lines that - there he is.

BALLARD: ... on planet Earth.

FLATOW: Without a beat. Can you hear me, Dr. Ballard, okay?

BALLARD: I certainly can.

FLATOW: Okay, that's good. Tell us about this adventure that you're about to go on. What are you going to be looking for? What's it involve?

BALLARD: Well these two ships will both be going on their maiden voyage this year, the Okeanus in the Pacific Ocean and the Nautilus will be in the Aegean. And then my favorite spot right now is the Black Sea. And what's really wonderful about these ships is because they're going where no one has gone before, and we don't know what we're going to find, we've had to come up with a whole new paradigm that we call Telepresence - a way of bringing experts to the scene of a discovery minutes after it's taken place. And so for the last 28 years, actually it was 28 years ago, we published this dream in National Geographic magazine. Someday ...

FLATOW: We have a copy right here, actually.

BALLARD: Absolutely.

FLATOW: We do. We have it right here.

BALLARD: Yeah, December 1981 issue. And the idea behind that is that you have these ships out exploring but they're connected by high-bandwidth satellite, from the bottom of the ocean to a new center. It's a new building we just dedicated at the Graduate School of Oceanography at URI, it's called the Inner Space Center. And it's sort of like Houston is to outer space, we have for inner space. And we are operating our vehicles 24 hours a day, and what they see is being beamed back to this Inner Space Center. And then from there, using this new wonderful Internet2 - this new high-bandwidth Internet that's sweeping the country right now - we're connecting all of the oceanographic institutions to the Inner Space Center so that we can actually bring a scientist aboard the ship, take him down to the bottom of the ocean, in a matter of seconds.

FLATOW: Well, I see. You've named this inner space as opposed to outer space.

BALLARD: Absolutely, it is inner space. It's the largest living volume on the planet. It's the world's oceans.

FLATOW: Is that a challenge to NASA? Are you poking them a little bit?

BALLARD: Absolutely. I mean, I love NASA. My father was an aerospace engineer and worked for North American Aviation. They built the Apollo spaceships, and so I was brought up on the space program. But I love outer space and I love the fact they're studying the heavens, and I hope to go there someday. But right now, I'm on earth and I want to know more about the planet that I'm living on. And we have better maps of Mars than our own planet. So I'm interested in exploring Earth.

FLATOW: So when you have - let's talk about this Telepresence. So you - if somebody finds something and it goes back to the hub, can you wake somebody up? Say hey, look we found something, you know ...

BALLARD: That's the idea. We're going to run it sort of like the way a hospital runs the emergency room. You know, a hospital has no idea what an ambulance is going to bring in Sunday morning at 2 a.m. So they have what's called a doctors-on-call. They have physicians that can respond to a hospital within 20 minutes if they're needed. So we're setting up this 20-minute response by connecting the oceanographic institutions, which can move at the speed of light through the Internet2. We're building remote consoles so that we can literally call someone up - imagine call them up 2 a.m. Sunday morning -wake them up, they'll be very angry at that moment. But then we'll tell them we made a discovery and that they're on call, and they won't be angry. Imagine, they're laying in bed, they'll take their laptop, they'll pop it open, they're naturally wireless in their homes. And we will then patch the phone to the pilot who's navigating this underwater vehicle in 20,000 feet of water, thousands of miles away, and they'll talk to the pilot and take over the con and then make a decision. They'll decide, you know, if we discovered something that wasn't that important, you know, they'll say take an aspirin and call me in the morning. But if it's really important, they'll jump out of bed, they'll get in their car - and they have to be within 20 minutes of one of these remote consoles - and while they're in their car, they're going to be calling their friends and their graduate students 'cause they need to take over the ship for the next couple days. So they'll need five or six other scientists. And then they'll all run to their consoles and they'll all be patched in, and then they'll all take over. It's really cool.

FLATOW: And so what area will you be looking at? And what will you be looking for?

BALLARD: Well in the Pacific, you know, we had a big get-together at National Geographic, who had been really helpful in all of this. We had a workshop working with NOAA and we brought in experts that have passion for the Pacific. About 40 different groups of scientists submitted white papers and said, you know, if you're ever in the Pacific and you want to discover something, go here. And so we got this map of the Pacific and it's got boxes all over it. And then what we're going to do is, we're going to move around, from box to box, but then we're going to wander along the way. We call it the box-and-stick strategy. I think most of the exciting discoveries will be done between boxes as we're navigating our way from A to B. And so we have that plan. They're now developing a schedule for the Okeanus and it'll begin, really, in earnest in May. Most of what's going on right now are sea trials. Our ship ...

FLATOW: But the Pacific is a big spot.

BALLARD: It's a third of the Earth.

FLATOW: Well, so which part of the Pacific do you look in?

BALLARD: Well, they're in Seattle right now and they're going to work their way across.

FLATOW: Oh, is that right?

BALLARD: They're going to work their way to the Indian Ocean. I mean, to the - excuse me - they're going to start in Seattle. They're going to work towards the Hawaiian islands. They're going to explore that entire seamount chain. Then they're going to end up, by May of next year, they'll be in Indonesia, in the Western regions of the Pacific. And then they'll work their way back. While they're doing that, our ship the Nautilus, will start its campaign, actually, next month. We're doing a program for National Geographic on the Battle of Gallipoli in the Dardanelles. And then we're going to come down the Sea of Marmara, is a very fascinating body of water if you know your geography. If you go up through the Aegean and you go through the Dardanelles, and that's where the Hellespont is where the Persian armies crossed on their way to battle the Greeks. This is also where the Germans and the Turks fought the British in the Battle of Gallipoli in World War I. And there's all sorts of warships that were sunk there. And there's a particular British submarine they'd like us to find called, E20. And it's in the Sea of Marmara, which is a sea between the Aegean and the Black Sea, and it's anoxic like the Black Sea. And it's also the same body of water that Jason and the Argonauts traversed in search of the Golden Fleece. So we know that it's had maritime trade for thousands and thousands of years, and we hope to find perfectly preserved ancient shipwrecks, while we're looking for this E20 submarine. So that's the first mission. Then we're going to come down the Aegean coast to an area called Yalikavak and Bodrum and the Eastern Aegean. And we, last year, found several ships from the time of Imperial Rome. We're going to be going back and imaging those and continuing our search. And then we're going to double-back up through the Bosphorus and go into the Black Sea, in early September, working with the Ukrainian Academy of Science - we're working off of the Crimea, which is - there used to be ancient Greek colonies there. One in particular called Chersonesos, and just off of that ancient Greek colony, the bottom of the ocean plunges down to 6,000 feet. And the water there is poisonous, it's completely anoxic. It's the largest reservoir of hydrogen sulfide on earth. And there we expect to find the most perfectly preserved ancient shipwrecks in the world.

FLATOW: Because there's no oxygen down there.

BALLARD: Exactly. There's no one to eat anything. In fact, we have already found a beautifully preserved Byzantine shipwreck on the other side of the Black Sea off the Turkish coast at a place called Sinop. And we found in 1,500 feet of water we came in with our robots and there was a ship's mast with rigging on it and we drop down 40 feet, and there was this ancient ship perfectly preserved.

FLATOW: Do you raise these ships? You plan on bringing these up?

BALLARD: Well, it has been done. I mean, certainly in typical marine archaeological programs they try to recover everything. That's not our strategy. Our strategy is actually to build underwater museums in place in about - not only around the ship off Turkey, but we also found a Byzantine shipwreck off of the Crimea and we're building underwater museums. And the reason for that is very simple. A lot of these ships had a lot of the same thing, they're sort of bulk carriers like stopping a truck on the I-95 and it's got a thousand of these things and a thousand of those things. We really don't want all of that stuff, we just need a representative sample. So what we're doing is we're actually storing everything down there because it's happy down there. It's equilibrated and we don't want to go through the expensive process of conservation and preservation and then have to take care of these objects for imperpetuity, which is a long time.

FLATOW: I get it.

BALLARD: As Yogi Berra would say ...

FLATOW: So let me just - let me just remind everybody that this is Science Friday from NPR news. I'm Ira Flatow talking with Bob Ballard about his explorations. So you leave the