Robert Ballard Lecture

I had the opportunity to attend a lecture given by Robert Ballard last night. I have at least five of his books that I can find and have always been interested in what he's done. The lecture was incredibly interesting.

Some takeaways:

He's 80 years old now, I envisioned him as mid 60's

He was inspired to do what he did in life by the Disney movie 2000 Leagues Under the Sea at age 12. He told his parents when they asked what he wanted to be and he told them Captain Nemo. They then took him to a Navy submarine base which was nearby and he toured a sub.

When he went to college, he joined the Army ROTC because that's what they had. He trained and was commissioned as a combat infantry officer.

Still at college he had a visit from a Naval officer who handed him a letter congratulating Lieutenant Ballard of the Army for becoming Ensign Ballard of the Navy. He didn't elaborate on this and it seems awful strange to just happen out of the blue like he made it appear.

He then spent 30 years in the navy mostly on a Research sub NR-1.

The bombshell in my opinion was his discovery of the Titanic. He wasn't supposed to find the Titanic. It was a cover story for what he was really up too, locating and surveying the US nuclear submarine Scorpion. Not sure how this worked as the locations are pretty far apart but that's how he tells it. When he found the Titanic, the navy was actually pretty upset with him. His Titanic work was broken up into two phases as he had to return to the Scorpion site the following year.

He made a lot of discoveries including pockets of life with no photosynthesis involved.

He is dyslexic but didn't know it until he was in his 60's.

He is a believer in the Earth Gaia and that the earth is going to kill us all off as a species within 100 years if we don't change our ways. He really lost me on this one. We might kill ourselves off in 100 years but the earth? No.

So he had a long Navy career, nearly all in research, which was continued with years of military funded research and exploration.

Interesting guy.

The NR-1 was quite the submarine its nuclear reactor was the size of a kitchen stove, had wheels under the hull so it could run along the bottom, had a scary moment when the went over the edge of a deep ravine and went well north of 1800 feet deep. From memory (Long time since I read the book on her build & exploits) her Titanium hulls circular tolerance was 1/16th of an inch.
Her sail was so small you'd be battling to see it when she was running surfaced that's why its bright orange, the sub was built for one purpose only espionage!

The books called as I'm looking at it from 3 feet away Dark Waters By Lee Vyborny and Don Davis