Bob Ballard has been “summoned to the sea” since he was a boy in search of tides on the California coast in the 1940s. But the youngster who would develop into a famous oceanographer also had another dream: to explore the Titanic.
Almost no one considered it possible. Ballard’s scuba-diving club thought that locating the lost ship was “a pipe dream.” Academic facilities where he studied, such as the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, considered Ballard’s idea a publicity stunt and not “good science.” And the US Navy, which provides logistical and financial support for many deepwater exploration, disqualifies its exploration of its resources.
“We’re doing serious, top secret missions here!” An Admiral surrendered in 1980 when Ballard asked for the Navy’s support to hunt down a long-lost luxury liner. “Titanic? We don’t have money for this.”
But in the 1980s, the United States was deep in the Cold War with the Soviet Union, and President Ronald Reagan enjoyed a psychological war on the enemy. Ballard knew that the Russians would have screws over their heads to find a lost passenger liner that had sunk in the Atlantic in 1912. Because he was once a naval officer and then often worked with the Navy using his advanced under. The water camera, Ballard was successful in taking his Titanic idea up to the chain of command, where the White House listened and agreed.
“Absolutely,” Zipper told Navy Secretary John Lehman during his first term. “Lets do it!”
Dr. Bob Ballard’s life is tracedInto the deep: a memoir from the man who found titanic“(National Geographic), off Tuesday. Written by Ballard and Christopher Drew, this book describes the struggle of an oceanographer who has become a famous adventurer – and finally achieves his dream.
Ballard first went to sea as a 17-year-old summer intern on a Scripps research ship. He gathered water samples to test sea temperature, above ripple waves in the “Hero’s Bucket” on the side of a fast-flying ship. During a shore vacation the teenager was taken to a Mexican strip club, and on the other he found himself amid a wild scuffle between an angry pulley operator and a drunken cook waving the butcher’s knife. By the time he returns home and asks his mom to “pass the F-King Butter” at dinner, young Bob’s fate is sealed as “old salt”.
The Ballard double-major in geology and chemistry at UC Santa Barbara, where the energetic youngster also joined the ROTC, pledged a fraternity, was a freshman basketball player and played on the “beat”. [Arthur Ashe] In a tennis tournament. He received his Ph.D. Partly in oceanography by training dolphins and whales at the Oceanic Institute and Sea Life Park near Honolulu. However, Ballard deferred, when asked to take part in a highly classified naval project training dolphins to kill “enemy divers in Vietnam”.
“It didn’t feel right to keep the animals in that position,” Ballard writes.
Boston discovered his fate in the late 1960s while working at the Naval Research Office in Boston. As a liaison officer, Bowler connected with research scientists at places such as the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution on Cape Cod, where he first saw Alvin, a 21-foot-tall submarine capable of carrying three people deep . Initially operating unmanned submersibles such as Alvin, and later unmanned ROVs (remotely operated vehicles), Baller began an unrivaled career of maritime exploration, using forever underwater cameras and sonar equipment Traced the lost ships for.
Alvin was a small sphere of only 6-sp feet in diameter, and Ballard recorded it as “climbing into a Swiss watch”. Between the pilot, engineer and research scientist Ballard, there was so little room that the men joked about “uniting their legs” at the end of the 8-hour-long journey. Each passenger had a small window to look outside, allowing Ballard not to see the underwater world seen by humans.
“Once on the floor, Alvin’s lights illuminate the scene,” Ballard writes. “I’m all eyes.”
In the 1970s, Ballard launched a French submarine deep down, using Alvin to bring rocks from the bottom of the Gulf of Maine and study the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. In the waters near the Galápagos, Ballard’s team proved the existence of hydrothermal vents by exploring the entire ecosystem of large white clams in uninhabited environments. By 1979, when a Ballard mission received hydrothermal vents called “black smokers” from Baja California, Mexico, the man was rewriting textbooks he’d read in college.
Ballard also found submerged ships. Off the Irish coast in 1993, he discovered Lusitania, a British liner equipped with German U-boats in World War I, and in 1998, deep in the Pacific, he found USS Yorktown, an American aircraft carrier lost in the Battle of Midway. Was. In 1989, about 16,000 feet below the French coast, he found the Nazi warship Bismarck in World War II.
But Ballard’s quest to find the Titanic was never far from his mind. He brought it first to his scuba diving friends in the late ’60s, who duped, and then tried to convince Woods Hole in the early’ 70s to use Alvin in search of a lost ship – But he refused. In 1977, Ballard gained access to a research vessel and tried to prepare it for the Titanic expedition, but was drowned somewhere on the ocean floor as a $ 600,000 dollar device. Ballard’s dream seemed doom.
‘The site held me back. Its spirit filled me and never let me go. ‘
Bob Ballard after finding Titanic at sea level
But after President Reagan indicated his support for the hunt for the Titanic, the Navy offered a prolific supporter: if Ballard would investigate the Atlantic crash sites of two American submarines mysteriously sinking during the 1960s , Then he can end the Titanic quest. Those missions. Ballard enthusiastically agreed, of course, but knew that it was not going to be easy.
At first, the exact location of the wreck was not known. When the ship sailed south of Newfoundland in 1912, its crew was navigating through the stars, so the exact coordinates were not clear. Inventors could limit the target area to 100 square miles, but those waters had strong tides and great depth.
Worse, there was competition in Ballard. The Titanic was a sacred grave for oceanographers, of course, but also for treasure seekers. In the summer of 1985, French explorers used sonar systems that reached the summit of Ballard, where the wreckage of the Titanic was thought of, but with 30 days of strong winds and bumpy seas descending after. After completing his classified work at submerged naval submarine sites in August, Ballard sent his research vessel off to Newfoundland. It would be ten days ahead of time and the money the Navy had allocated had escaped, but Ballard had calm weather and high expectations.
Aided by a crew of 49, Ballard’s plan was about 2-. The mile-long was to tow a submarine behind his ship on a cable. With two sonars and three video cameras, the unmanned vessel will fall to a depth of about 13,000 feet, its video is viewable on screen in the research vessel’s command center. Because Baller’s Submersible had great cameras but only so much sonar, his only hope was to see the Titanic visually, not the sound it had never done before in underwater research.
For a few days he drove the submarine backward within the foothills of the sea, from the filthy depths, and only after an endless time of looking into the mud, Ballard’s optimism began to go in vain. Then the long cable pulling the submersible was tangled and almost destroyed, which ruined the mission.
Finally, disappointed in his cot late at night, Ballard was summoned to the command center with the words he wanted to hear:
“Wreck!”
He ran to see the wreck on each of the three video screens. It was, Ballard writes, “Oh, my God Moment.”
“It was there, one of the 29 boilers that made steam for Titanic’s engines.” It was a signature piece. . . Bull’s eye! “
The submarine continued to scan the area of the Titanic’s wreckage, 12,500 feet below the surface of the North Atlantic, with tea cups and bath tubs, shoes and accessories, champagne bottles still in its cork. At one point from the darkness a face was clearly visible, fortunately not. Human remains but a child’s long-forgotten baby doll.
“Now the site has caught me. Its spirit filled me and never let me go, ”Ballard writes.
They themselves follow the trail of the sinking shipwreck, swimming to their bows to see “the forefront with the bow’s nest”, where the watchman must have first seen the dreaded iceberg on that dreaded night; On the deck of the boat, where the Titanic’s lifeboats were launched; The entrance atop the Grand Staircase is theoretically one of the crowning achievements of the ship. There was a hole where the bridge of the ship was supposed to be, and another uplifted on the foredeck where the crew must have slept, but all of this was clearly the famous missing ship.
Bob Ballard had found the Titanic.
After discovering the wreck, Ballard could claim “rescue rights”, but he presumed to have robbed the grave and left the Titanic as he found it. But by the time he came back 18 years later, other companies had swooped down and uprooted more than 6,000 artifacts, either selling them – for a $ 25 Titanic coal pile, for example – or sending them to a Titanic museum. Put it in It is probably remorseful about the whole experience.
“It had turned into an ugly carnival, the fate of Titanic and all those who lost their lives in their final hours,” writes.
Although Ballard was already a legend for his scientific discoveries, the discovery of the Titanic brought widespread fame. She was invited to dinner at the White House in 1985 (with John Travolta on the famous Princess Princess D), and when President Reagan met her in the receiving line, she answered questions about his exciting discovery. . Director James Cameron regularly called Bowler for information and advice during the filming of his 1997 film “Titanic” and later pulled him to the film’s DC premiere.
In 1998, Ballard was awarded the National Geographic Centenary Award as a “pioneer of discovery”, but his career did not end there. As recently as 2019, he searched through the waters around American Samoa for the wreckage of Amelia Earhart’s plane. Although he failed to find it, he declared the mission successful.
“At least now we know where he is not,” he writes.
Ballard is now about 80 years old, living happily in Connecticut with his family in semi-retirement, but he plans to continue searching for Earhart in 2022. After all, even on this day, the man is “called to the sea.”
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