Robert Ballard
Robert Ballard
Robert Duane Ballardis a retired United States Navy officer and a professor of oceanography at the University of Rhode Island who is most noted for his work in underwater archaeology: maritime archaeology and archaeology of shipwrecks. He is most known for the discoveries of the wrecks of the RMS Titanic in 1985, the battleship Bismarck in 1989, and the aircraft carrier USS Yorktown in 1998. He discovered the wreck of John F. Kennedy's PT-109 in 2002 and visited Biuku Gasa and...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionExplorer
Date of Birth30 June 1942
CityWichita, KS
CountryUnited States of America
Forever may it remain that way. And may God bless these now-found souls.
If you compare NASA's annual budget to explore the heavens, that one year budget would fund NOAA's budget to explore the oceans for 1,600 years.
Why are we ignoring the oceans? Why does NASA spend in one year what NOAA will spend in 1600 years? Why are we looking up? Why are we afraid of the ocean?
Most of the southern hemisphere is unexplored. We had more exploration ships down there during Captain Cook's time than now. It's amazing.
NASA's annual budget for space exploration could fund NOAA's budget for ocean exploration for 1600 years.
Fifty percent of the United States of America is underneath the ocean. And we have better maps of Mars than those areas.
The fact that this chain of life existed [at volcanic vents on the seafloor] in the black cold of the deep sea and was utterly independent of sunlight-previously thought to be the font of all Earth's life-has startling ramifications. If life could flourish there, nurtured by a complex chemical process based on geothermal heat, then life could exist under similar conditions on planets far removed from the nurturing light of our parent star, the Sun.
My final question: Why are we not looking at moving out onto the sea? Why do we have programs to build a habitation on Mars and we have programs to look at colonizing the Moon but we do not have a program looking at how we colonize our own planet, and the technology is at hand!
Well, when I was a kid, I grew up in San Diego next to the ocean. The ocean was my friend - my best friend.
The deep sea is the largest museum on earth, it contains more history than all the museums on land combined, and yet we're only now penetrating it.
The threat from flash flooding is diminishing rapidly. We're not completely out of the woods, but we're on the right path.
I am really dedicated to understanding the planet/creature on which we live and know that means I must go beneath the sea to see 72 percent of what is going on.
So, I'm able to network experts on demand, when I need them.
I'm a geophysicist and all my earth science books when I was a student, I had to give the wrong answer to get an A. We used to ridicule continental drift. It was something we laughed at. We learned of Marshall Kay's geosynclinal cycle, which is a bunch of crap.