MILT THOMAS

Based on his lineage, the last field you would expect to find Bob Ballard is the bottom of the sea. Born in Kansas, Ballard is the son of a test pilot who flew with Chuck Yaeger, this grandson of a sheriff killed in a gunfight and the great-grandson of frontier legend, Bat Masterson. His family first came to our shores in 1635.

“Yes, but the single greatest influence on my young life was the book by Jules Verne, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. I wanted to be Captain Nemo, captain of the Nautilus.”

When he was a mere lad, his family moved to Southern California. “It was there that my passive interest in the underwater world changed when I learned how to SCUBA dive.”

He now saw the undersea world of his childhood imagination and he was hooked. In 1959, during his junior year of high school, Ballard received a scholarship to the Scripps Institute of Oceanography in LaJolla, California. On one ocean field trip, he met Dr. Robert Norris, who invited him to the University of California at Santa Barbara, where he earned his undergraduate degree in Geology and Chemistry. He has a Ph.D. in marine geology and geophysics from the University of Rhode Island.

Dr. Ballard’s next defining moment after learning how to SCUBA dive, was his first dive in a submersible in 1969 off the coast of Florida. But to the rest of the world, his defining moment came with his discovery of the Titanic in 1985, 12,000 feet below the surface in icy cold waters. “It took me two and a half hours to reach the bottom and the same time coming back up, which left only three hours to work at the site.”

It was an expedition financed by National Geographic, as were his subsequent discoveries of the German World War II battleship, the Bismarck, in 1989, the aircraft carrier USS Yorktown in 1998 and John Kennedy’s PT-109 in 2002.  But the discoveries of scientific importance were the ones he is most proud of. “It’s the discoveries that rewrite biology books that interest me the most. For instance, finding warm water springs with exotic animal species in the Galapagos Rift and “black smokers,” deep sea hypothermal vents.”

Ballard points out that more than half our country lies beneath the sea. “And that is territory we own. Yet we have better maps of Mars than of this geography under us.”

He usually spends half a year at sea (“I’ve done 140 explorations over the past 55 years”) and most of it on his own ship, aptly named the Nautilus. “It was an East German spy ship that we renovated and re-outfitted for our use.

Oceanographer Robert Ballard speaks on February 8, 2014 Emerson Center Celebrated Speaker Series. If you don’t have your tickets, call 772-778-5249, go online at TheEmersonCenter.org or visiting The Emerson Center itself