Oceanographer Rewrites the Conventional Wisdom

An Interview with Dr. Robert Ballard
Founder and President, Institute for Exploration at Mystic Aquarium, Mystic, Connecticut

American oceanographer Robert Ballard has played a prominent role in deep-sea discoveries in geology and biology.

Oceanographer Robert Ballard on the eve of his expedition to the Black Sea in June 2003. (AP/WWP)

As this publication went to press, Robert Ballard announced that he will return to the Titanic in June 2004 for further study of the legendary 1912 shipwreck he first discovered in 1985. See the Additional Resources section for further details on the announcement made jointly with NOAA and the National Geographic Society.

Dr. Robert Ballard might be best known to the general public as the scientist who led a mission to the floor of the North Atlantic to rediscover the sunken hulk of the cruise liner Titanic, one of the most storied shipwrecks of all time. Ballard is also a pioneer in deep-sea science, still a fledgling discipline. He is linked to landmark scientific discoveries that overturned the conventional wisdom of their time. Ballard is also a member of the U.S. Commission on Ocean Policy that will soon issue a report proposing significant change in ocean policy. Ballard talked with Global Issues Managing Editor Charlene Porter.

Question: People on your staff say you’ve been known to wave your arm across a world map, with its vast blue expanses, and say, “All of this, we know nothing about.” But you’ve been at this oceanography business for almost 40 years. Surely you know something?

Ballard: We know how much we don’t know.

Q: That’s the question then. What’s the state of oceanography today in terms of your accumulation of knowledge about the deep seas?

Ballard: In the first place, we start with the fact that 72 percent of the Earth is under water. Then, the majority of that, 80-some percent, is deep water. A large amount of that is in the high seas, beyond the exclusive economic zones of other nations. Most of it -- the majority of it -- is in the Southern Hemisphere. We are a Northern Hemisphere-centric civilization. With most of the water in the Southern Hemisphere, most of the land is in the north. As a result, all the wars we have fought, all the lines of commerce [are mostly in the Northern Hemisphere], the places closest to home. We tend to spend a lot of time up there.

During the 18th and 19th centuries, England had more exploratory ships in the Southern Hemisphere than we have today. We’re seldom down there. There are vast stretches of ocean that have never had an oceanographic ship pass over it.

Although we’re up on Mars right now, we already have better maps of Mars than we have of the Earth’s surface if we include all that undersea territory. We don’t have very good [ocean] maps, particularly of the Southern Hemisphere. It’s sort of ironic, for example, that Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin ¹ went to the moon before ocean explorers went to the biggest mountain range on Earth ² which was in 1973.

As we look to where we are in exploration currently, NOAA’s [National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration] exploration budget is one-tenth of 1 percent of NASA’s [National Air and Space Administration] budget. It’s very much in the Lewis and Clark phase. ³

Despite how little we know, how little we’ve explored, we’ve made some pretty phenomenal discoveries recently in the parts we have explored.

Q: One of those is the discovery of hydrothermal vents, the hot springs of the sea floor where magma erupts from the center of the Earth to form new oceanic crust and lends heat to the coldest depths of the sea.

Ballard: I was chief scientist of that expedition in 1977, working with a wonderful team from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, Oregon State University, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Q: In addition to the geologic discovery of the vents, describe the surprising biologic discovery – deep-sea life forms never previously seen.

Ballard: The irony was we weren’t even looking for them. It was serendipity. We didn’t even have a biologist on the expedition when we made the largest, most important discovery made on Earth. We weren’t even prepared for the discovery. Imagine how much is out there that we aren’t looking for that will have comparable repercussions.

Prior to that discovery we didn’t understand the chemistry of the world’s ocean. We couldn’t explain why the ocean was salty. Until we discovered there was a whole other circulation system; in addition to the hydraulic cycle, there was a hydrothermal cycle that we were not aware of. Now we are aware that the entire volume of the world’s oceans goes inside the Earth through a hot system every 6 to 8 million years. Once we discovered that system -- and understood the magnitude of it -- and once we began to look at its chemistry, we were finally able for the first time in the 1980s to balance the equations. We could do the mathematic calculations and finally explain why the ocean is salty.

At the same time, we made the discovery of the circulation system – which we were looking for – we made this biologic discovery of this whole new system that was not based upon the Sun through the process of photosynthesis. That’s what we were all taught in the textbooks: life on Earth is due to the Sun, and the Sun sends its photons through space, and they’re captured by the chlorophyll of plants, and plants are the basis of the food chain, and up, up, up through the orders of life until you get to humans.

Now we realize there is a whole other system, a system based on extremophiles, that is, bacteria living in very hostile environments, that are able to replicate photosynthesis in the dark chemically. It was huge, huge.

Q: What was it like to be in the midst of a “Eureka!” moment like that?

Ballard: It was amazing. We were stunned. We were flabbergasted. We were just trying to comprehend it. It was really a moment when you felt somewhat insane, or like you were hallucinating until it started to sink in what you’d discovered.

Now it helps us understand the origins of life on Earth. It’s also helping us in our prospecting for life on Mars, and our future prospecting for life on the moon of Jupiter, particularly Europa where we think there’s an ocean under an ice canopy and there could be life.

So all of a sudden, it changed the rules of looking for life elsewhere. All of a sudden, there were many more possibilities than we previously thought. We found that life is much more resourceful, much more robust than we ever thought. It totally reshaped our thinking in a very dramatic way.

I’ve been lucky to be involved in several major “gotchas” [discoveries that contradict accepted science]. Plate tectonics was certainly one of them with our first dives to the mid-ocean ridge in the early 1970s, followed by the discovery of hydrothermal vents in 1977, followed by the discovery of black smokers and the major mineral deposits in 1979. Then I went on to human history with the discovery of the Titanic and a number of things after that.

So it’s been really a great adventure, and I can’t wait for the next one, and I’m confident that it’s out there.

Q: When you experience a moment like that – when you see the conventional wisdom upended – do you continue to question the conventional wisdom in all your work after that?

Ballard: Absolutely! Science is a work in progress. Everything I was taught as a geologist in undergraduate school was shown to be wrong later on. The textbooks were absolutely, categorically wrong. First we threw out the geology textbooks. Then we threw out the biology and chemistry textbooks, and now we’re starting to throw out the anthropology and archaeology textbooks.

Q: You refer there to the recent work you’ve done in underwater archaeology in which you’ve found ancient shipwrecks in the Mediterranean and the Black seas. What conventional wisdom is overthrown with those discoveries?

Ballard: The fact that the wrecks are out there at all. The conventional wisdom was that ancient mariners hugged the coastline. We’re finding that to be balderdash. We’re finding that they went far out to sea. We’re just beginning to see how adventurous they were. We’re also finding the wrecks to be in high states of preservation, which also defies conventional wisdom that they wouldn’t be intact.

Q: You call these shipwrecks “museums of the deep.” Why? What can they tell us?

Ballard: They are time capsules. We now think there are 1 million ships of antiquity in the ocean.

Q: On what basis do you make that estimate?

Ballard: Through estimates made by scholars on the loss of ships through time. Remember societies have been going to sea for thousands of years, particularly the Romans. They kept very good records, and you get a sense of the mortality. They had about a 10 percent ship loss; then you spin that out over thousands of years. Then you look at sea battles where they lost a thousand here and a thousand there. It starts to really add up. Even if I was only half right, half a million is still a lot.

Shipwrecks are pure moments in time; they are time capsules. Whereas you go to an archaeological site on land, and you begin digging and there’s someone on top of someone on top of someone. The last culture borrowed from the previous one. They commingle. It gets complicated to figure out what’s going on.

A ship sank on that one day, and its shipboard society of that moment went into a museum on the ocean bottom. We were in the Black Sea this summer where there’s no oxygen, and what we’re discovering now is that the ships are perfectly preserved, and we suspect we’re going to start pulling out absolutely, perfectly preserved humans.

Q: How will they inform our understanding of who we are today and where we came from?

Ballard: That’s the point. They will, but we don’t know until we open the time capsules and read them. It’s a work in progress.

This hasn’t happened yet, but say we find Phoenician shipwrecks off Brazil. What would that do to our thinking? What will those discoveries be? You won’t know ‘til you do it.

Q: So ancient shipwrecks could redefine our entire understanding of world history and civilization?

Ballard: We’re going to better define who these people were. We’ll pull their bodies out, and perform DNA testing. We’ll find out who the Phoenicians were. Who were the Minoans? We don’t know.

So the discovery of these ancient mariners is going to change our thinking.

Q: The technology has been progressing rapidly in recent years so that oceanographers can reach the depths where these discoveries are made. What further advances do you foresee in that arena?

Ballard: The thing we’re moving forward is what we call "telepresence remote accessing." We see, for example, the Titanic or some of these shipwrecks becoming wired as museums in situ. We see the ocean being wired, whether it’s for monitoring earthquakes or volcanic activity or environmental monitoring, or whether you’re creating underwater battlefields, underwater memorials, and underwater museums that are accessed via Internet 2. Internet 2 is a new technology that’s revolutionizing remote accessing and telepresence, and we’re in the middle of all that. We see Internet 2 as a tremendous empowerer of people able to go to remote areas without having to physically go, and the whole evolution of the technologies of autonomous vehicles is cutting-edge. We’re on all those cutting edges. That’s where the action is and that’s going to continue to accelerate the process.

Q: Another project to which you’re very committed is education. We’ve been talking for some years in this country about the need to improve science and math education. How is that effort going from your perspective?

Ballard: The way of educating, motivating, and captivating youngsters needs to be very different. Utilization of technology that puts a student in direct contact with the scientist in the battlefield is the way to go. That’s what the JASON Project ⁴ does. We have 1.7 million children in our program; we have 38,000 teachers.

Q: You launched the JASON Project after receiving heaps of letters from young people asking, “How did you find the Titanic?” How does the project involve kids in oceanography?

Ballard: They go out in the field. You bring students and teachers into the field with you and -- with this telepresence technology -- they then become the surrogates connected to the classroom teacher and classroom student. They are then interacting on a peer-to-peer level – student-to-student, teacher-to-teacher – with a scientist who is in an exciting frontier. The learning environment is so much more engaging for kids, in contrast to a static interaction with a scientist in a laboratory or material in a textbook.

Textbooks? Forget them. Throw them away. They’re out of date by the time they get into the students’ hands. As the rate of information advances today, a textbook becomes a history book. You can’t use that traditional form. You have to have curriculum that’s dripping wet, that you just wrote, that’s almost news. When it becomes news, it becomes exciting. So when you get it in that kind of format, it’s in keeping with the way our society is moving, the way entertainment and news are paced. It’s very energized, more so than it’s ever been. People want to be where the action is -- bam-bam-bam -- want to know, get on the Internet -- boom-boom-boom. In that kind of social atmosphere, you can’t expect the old classroom methods to work anymore.

Q: That’s how you want to get youngsters interested in oceanography. What about adults? Do you find that the general public doesn’t really share your sense of wonder and discovery about what’s out there?

Ballard: I think it’s more of trying to get people to realize how little we know about our own planet. It’s an assumption that we know it. “Now that we’ve got Earth all figured out, let’s go to outer space,” is what people are thinking. I have to say, “No, no, no. We don’t have Earth done.”

It’s hard for that to sink in. People think that since we know where all the land is, that’s it. The land is only 28 percent. That’s our biggest challenge.