Robert Ballard

He has attributed his early interest in underwater exploration to watching the film 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, an adaptation of Jules Verne’s 1870 novel.

While he was a high school student, his father connected him with oceanographers at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, and he participated in several short research expeditions.

Ballard enrolled at University of California, Santa Barbara, and joined the Army Reserve Officer Training Corps.

Robert Duane Ballard (born June 30, 1942) is an American retired 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.

Robert Duane Ballard was born on June 30, 1942 in Wichita, Kansas.

He had an older brother, Richard, and younger sister, Nancy Ann.

When Ballard was two years old, his family moved to southern California, where his father worked as a flight test engineer.

Beginning in 1962, Ballard worked part-time with Andreas Rechnitzer's Ocean Systems Group at North American Aviation, where his father was the chief engineer of North American's Minuteman missile program.

At North American, Ballard worked on its failed proposal to build the submersible Alvin for the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

In 1965, Ballard graduated from the University of California, Santa Barbara, earning undergraduate degrees in chemistry and geology.

While a student in Santa Barbara, California, he joined Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity, and also completed the US Army's ROTC program, giving him an Army officer's commission in Army Intelligence.

Ballard joined the United States Army in 1965 through the Army's Reserve Officers Training program.

He was designated as an intelligence officer and initially received a commission as a second lieutenant in the Army Reserve.

His first graduate degree (MS, 1966) was in geophysics from the University of Hawaiʻi's Institute of Geophysics where he trained porpoises and whales.

Subsequently, he returned to Andreas Rechnitzer's Ocean Systems Group at North American Aviation.

Ballard was working towards a PhD in marine geology at the University of Southern California in 1967 when he was called to active duty.

Upon his request, he was transferred from the Army into the US Navy as an oceanographer.

The Navy assigned him as a liaison between the Office of Naval Research and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Woods Hole, Massachusetts.

When called to active duty in 1967, he asked to fulfill his obligation in the United States Navy.

His request was approved, and he was transferred to the Navy Reserve on the reserve active duty list.

Ballard's first dive in a submersible was in the Ben Franklin (PX-15) in 1969 off the coast of Florida during a Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution expedition.

After leaving active duty and entering into the Naval Reserve in 1970, Ballard continued working at Woods Hole persuading organizations and people, mostly scientists, to fund and use Alvin for undersea research.

Four years later he received a PhD in marine geology and geophysics at the University of Rhode Island.

After completing his active duty obligation in 1970, he was returned to reserve status, where he remained for much of his military career, being called up only for mandatory training and special assignments.

In summer 1970, he began a field mapping project of the Gulf of Maine for his doctoral dissertation.

It used an air gun that sent sound waves underwater to determine the underlying structure of the ocean floor and the submersible Alvin, which was used to find and recover a sample from the bedrock.

Ballard was geologist diver in Alvin during Project FAMOUS, which explored the median rift valley of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge in 1974.

During the summer of 1975, Ballard participated in a joint French-American expedition called Phere searching for hydrothermal vents over the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, but the expedition did not find any active vents.

On the Galapagos spreading center east of the islands a 1977 exploration by Alvin found deep-sea hydrothermal vents and surrounding biology communities based on chemosynthesis.

Ballard was a participating diver.

The 1979 RISE project expedition on the East Pacific Rise west of Mexico at 21°N was aided by deep-towed still camera sleds that were able to take pictures of the ocean floor, making it easier to find hydrothermal vent locations.

When Alvin inspected one of the sites the deep-tow located, the scientists observed black "smoke" billowing out of the vents, something not observed at the Galápagos Rift.

Ballard and geophysicist Jean Francheteau went down in Alvin the day after the black smokers were first observed.

They were able to take an accurate temperature reading of the active vent (the previous dive's thermometer had melted), and recorded a temperature of 350 C.

They continued searching for more vents along the East Pacific Rise between 1980 and 1982.

He is best known for the discoveries of the wrecks of the RMS Titanic in 1985, the battleship Bismarck in 1989, and the aircraft carrier USS Yorktown (CV-5) in 1998.

He retired from the Navy as a commander in 1995 after reaching the statutory service limit.

He discovered the wreck of John F. Kennedy's PT-109 in 2002 and visited Biuku Gasa and Eroni Kumana, who saved its crew.

Despite his long successes in shipwrecks, Ballard considers his most important discovery to be that of hydrothermal vents.

Ballard has also established the JASON Project and leads ocean exploration on the research vessel E/V Nautilus.