Robert Ballard on finding the Titanic and other deep-sea discoveries

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1:57days before anywhere else, first on BBC Sounds. Hello. In 1985, my guest today found perhaps the most famous shipwreck in history. More than 70 years after the Titanic slipped beneath the waves, oceanographer Robert Ballard located her resting place, about two miles down in the depths of the North Atlantic. His discovery made headlines around the world. But ask Robert himself about is great as fine, and he'll point you somewhere else entirely, to something that might not have generated quite the same media storm, but had a huge scientific impact. Long before he found the Titanic, Bob helped discover hydrothermal vents on the ocean floor, previously unknown underwater formations around which entire ecosystems were thriving without sunlight.

2:47This forced scientists to rethink some fundamental assumptions about how and where life can exist. Over a career spanning six decades, Bob has racked up numerous other achievements. He's worked on revolutionary underwater technologies, led hundreds of expeditions and founded the Ocean Exploration Trust. And even today, Bob is still exploring. As he points out, when it comes to the depths of the ocean, there's plenty to be found. Bob Ballard, welcome to The Life Scientific. It's nice to join you. Thank you for having me. We often hear, Bob, that the age of the explorer is over, that everything's being discovered.

3:23But that doesn't apply to our oceans, does it? No, quite the opposite. In fact, we've seen 0.001 % with the human eye or cameras. One thousandth. I get letters from kids saying, would you stop exploring so there's something left for me? And particularly when it comes to shipwrecks. And I said, well, there's three million shipwrecks still waiting for you. Goodness me. I mentioned you finding the Titanic in the introduction. In fact, that's just one element in a lifetime of amazing finds. But I gather your mother made a comment just after that discovery, something like, it's too bad you found that rusty old boat.

4:04That's all they're going to remember you for. Did that worry you at the time? Well, it was somewhat of a surprise because I'm the first of my family to go to college. And my mom from Kansas, a brilliant woman, but never went to college, really was so proud to have not only myself, but my smarter older brother who got a PhD in particle physics become PhDs and do great science. And so, yeah, she understood my discoveries, my scientific discoveries. And she said, finding the origin of life on Earth, I think, is a little more important, Bob, than finding a rusty old ship on the bottom of the ocean.

4:44Moms are always right. Yes, indeed. Indeed. You've been involved in finding and studying plenty of other famous shipwrecks over the years, including the Bismarck and the Lusitania. Now, of all the shipwreck discoveries, do you have a personal favourite? Well, yes, it was in the Black Sea. The Black Sea is an amazing place because it has no oxygen in its deep waters. It's the largest reservoir of dissolved hydrogen sulfide, which is toxic to all life. And there you find perfectly preserved shipwrecks. and that when we came across our first one with a mast rising, the artifacts looked like they had been there for three days, human remains.

5:30It's quite the place. It's not an easy place to work there now, but I was lucky to get about 10 years of exploration in the Black Sea and I'd go back there if I could tomorrow. So these are shipwrecks then, very old ones? Oh yes, dating way back, you know, thousands of years. It's really a deep sea museum. Goodness me. Well, Bob, you were born in 1942 in Wichita, Kansas, but the family moved west for your father's job. So you actually grew up on the Californian coast. Did you spend a lot of time by the sea as a kid? Yeah, so my dad moved us, the family to San Diego, and our home was within walking distance.

6:13And I always loved to walk the beach and find treasures the sea brought to me. It was my favorite place, tidal pools in particular, because each tidal cycle would trap a different set of creatures. One time it would be an octopus trying to hide. The next time it would be a crab that would fight to the death if you tried to pick it up. And that's where I I just loved exploring as an early age. And I gather your love of the sea was also fed by fiction. Correct. See, I'm dyslexic and I never read the book 20 ,000 Leagues Under the Sea. But when I was 12, I saw Walt Disney's movie and I was captivated by the submarine Nautilus.

6:56In fact, my ship is named Nautilus. And my parents didn't laugh when I told them I wanted to be Captain Nemo. They said, well, that sounds like an oceanographer. Well, Bob, your love of the oceans and oceanography fed your interest in science at high school. How did it come about? Well, I got a scholarship when I was in high school, a National Science Foundation scholarship. I was 17 years old and I went out on my first expedition with the Scripps Institute of Oceanography in La Jolla, California. And I just fell in love with the voyage. And I remember I thought I wanted to be a marine biologist because most kids always do.

7:35And I met two freshly minted PhDs in marine biology. And I said, oh, my goodness, you're in my role. He says, don't do it. We can't get a job. Go into another field. And I said, well, I didn't know there were other fields. Yes, go into the physical sciences. So I majored in chemistry and geology and minored in physics and mathematics and became a Swiss army knife. I'm curious about everything. Well, that was at the University of California, Santa Barbara. And while you were there, you also joined the Reserve Officers Training Corps, essentially doing military training alongside academic degrees.

8:11I mean, was that mandatory at the time to do that? Yes. In 1960, on all land-grant universities, in other words, it's affiliated with the state, all men had to do their freshman, sophomore year in the military. And here we are looking out at the beautiful Channel Islands, and they only offered army. But they said, if you graduate in the top of your class, you can transfer. So I made sure that I was a distinguished military graduate. And so when I got my commission in the army after going to Fort Lewis for basic training. I applied for an inter-service transfer and the miracle happened because they assigned me.

8:50My Navy submarine was called the NR-1. And the NR-1, if you look it up, was the deepest diving nuclear submarine, but it had windows. It was the modern version of the Nautilus. And then they assigned me to the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and its deep diving So it's always amazing how you plan your life and then something random comes along. And as they say, the rest is history. Yeah, I mean, lucky break there, I guess. So, as you say, you were assigned to this deep submergence laboratory at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, where alongside your naval role, you started a PhD in marine geology and geophysics at the University of Rhode Island, focused on deep sea formations because your work at Woods Hole involves some brand new kit, a manned research submersible called Elvin.

9:45Now tell me about Elvin. Well, I'm 6 '2". Imagine three people that are 6 '2 or more crawling inside a titanium sphere that's, I mean, literally you try to untie us when we come back out. It's such a crammed space. People say, aren't you claustrophobic? And I said, you know, if it didn't have windows, yes. But when I look outside, I'm so glad I'm inside. And I dove in quite a number of them. And the problem is, is like I dove, for example, to the deepest active volcanoes in the world off the Cayman Islands in 20 ,000 feet of water, great down 6 ,000 meters. And it took me six hours to get to work in the morning and six hours to get home at night.

10:31And I only had a few hours on the bottom. Well, Elvin really made its mark around 1973 as part of Project Famous. That was the French-American Mid-Ocean Undersea Study. And it was all about conducting the first manned exploration of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, which you wrote up and published in the journal Science in 1975. What was it that you found? Well, I was lucky to be a graduate student during the revolution in the earth sciences when Alfred Wegener's old theory of continental drifting, he was a meteorologist and everyone thought it was nuts and he died in ridicule, but his theory proved to be accurate, evolving into what became the theory of plate tectonics.

11:16He just couldn't understand the driving mechanism, but the earth has pieces that are in a beautiful ballet called plates and they do three things. They either pull apart and it's like when you cut yourself, you bleed warm blood, your blood coagulates and forms new skin. When you pull the earth's skin open, its plates, it bleeds molten lava that rises up and forms new tissue. And that's what's happening along the entire length of the mid-ocean ridge. It runs around the earth like the seam on a soccer ball. And it's on that boundary where earth creates its outer skin. But since it's in steady state, where you create new skin, you must be eating old skin.

11:57And that's what's happening when the plates collide, particularly in the Pacific where the plates subduct and one goes beneath the other. And then the third kind of behavior is where they're neither separating or converging. They're moving alongside one another, like the San Andreas Fault in California where I lived. But that's plate tectonics. Well, that project really proved Alvin's value and paved the way for that groundbreaking discovery I mentioned earlier. In 1977, while diving on the Galapagos Rift, your team discovered a phenomenon that would reframe our understanding of ocean biology, hydrothermal vents.

12:36Talk me through how that came about. Well, like a lot of discoveries, we bumped into them. When I was doing my thesis, I had half my committee believed in plate tectonics and the other half did not. They said, well, you know, I can understand that when two plates come together and crash into one another, like you have off of India crashing into China. But how do you make a mountain when you pull plates apart? And one of my colleagues, my co-scientist on the expedition, was a geophysicist, he said, it's a cooling curve. When the lava first comes out and forms the new lithosphere, the new crust, it's swollen with heat energy.

13:13It's a blister. But as it moves away from its side of Genesis, it gets denser. So he went out in the Atlantic and said, I'm going to drop a heat probe into to the bottom. And I'm going to tell you in advance what the temperature is. And sure enough, all along that mountain range, the temperature was exactly what he predicted, except at the very axis. And he said, how can you be 99 % right? There must be hot springs. So when we went out to the Galapagos Rift, we wanted to find what we call the delta T, the missing heat. So we went looking for hot springs, we went down and looked out our window and there were these giant tubeworms and clams and complete ecosystem.

14:00It was like an oasis in the Sahara Desert. And we realized when we got the first clam, it was about, you know, 30 centimeters long. It was a giant clam. And their whole body was full of chemosynthetic, what we call extremophiles, that can ingest this fluid, which has poisonous hydrogen sulfide in solution, will oxidize it in total darkness and create a replica of photosynthesis in the dark. And this really opened the ballgame. Because before that discovery, we thought we lived in the Goldilocks of the solar system, not too close to the sun, not too far away. All of a sudden, we realized that you could have life elsewhere, even within in our own solar system.

14:44I mean, that's fascinating because, as you say, these creatures that were living down by these hydrothermal vents, too deep in the ocean for any sunlight to carry out photosynthesis, but they're carrying out this chemosynthesis. They can still get their energy. They replicate photosynthesis in the dark by oxidizing the hydrogen sulfide. It's incredible. A couple of years later, Bob, that discovery was reinforced when you were exploring the East Pacific Rise, a massive underwater mountain range in the Eastern Pacific Ocean. Yes, and we were there because when we found hydrothermal vents at the Galapagos Rift, I think the maximum temperature was about 37 degrees centigrade, we could theorise that it started a kilometre down at around 350 degrees centigrade.

15:34We thought it could never make it to the surface because it would be diluted on the way up. So when we went to the 21 degrees north, we expect to see hydrothermal vents and clams. And I remember looking out of my window and seeing this giant chimney about 10 meters tall. And I remember telling my pilot, I want to measure its temperature. And he said, I don't. And I said, let's go up. So we had to be 10 meters above the bottom to come in on it. And it's got a venturi effect. So it was pulling us towards it. Now, the pilot was getting really nervous because he's trying to back away, back away, back away.

16:13And we finally got up to it. And I took the manipulator and I had a temperature probe. And I stuck it in the top of the smoker. And it pegged off scale. And my pilot made this great observation, that's hot. And when we measured the temperature, it was 350 degrees centigrade, hot enough to melt lead. And our porthole, he said, if that hits our porthole, we're dead. Cheers to fall savings at Whole Foods Market, home of higher ingredient standards. This Halloween, share chocolates and candies made without that spooky high fructose corn syrup. Throwing a party? Make it easy with a Barry Chantilly cake.

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18:16And check out Claude Pro, which includes access to all of the features mentioned in today's episode. Claude.ai slash solve. Goodness me. Today, of course, deep sea exploration can be done very differently. So remote underwater technology, robots that can be operated with complete precision by someone on the surface, which I think is exactly what most marine biologists or geologists who are studying the ocean bed, this is the way they operate now. Yes, and what we do with the Nautilus, we don't have scientists aboard the Nautilus. Well, we have a couple, one on each watch. So here's how it works.

18:56The watch leader has a book of experts who have signed up willing to be called that moment. And so we make a discovery and we stream the discovery and say, what do you think? And actually, we're moving towards ships that have no humans on them. More and more AI is entering the game. So at the risk of sounding naively nostalgic, does it also remove some of the fun of that first-hand experience? Yeah, but do you want to do it 12 months a year? See, here's where we're headed. I have this technology in my home right now. So I literally don't send my body to the bottom of the ocean. I send my spirit.

19:42And you can watch Nautilus Live at nautiluslive.org, and you will be in the command center with me, and you can ask questions 24 hours a day. And once we put our vehicles down, we don't bring them up. And the beauty of it is, see, I'm about the commoner. I want it so that all of us can explore our planet. So I think electronic travel is a huge social swing. Well, Bob, in the wake of these discoveries, you were approached by the US Navy to help them with, at that point, classified investigations into two of their shipwrecked nuclear submarines. Yes. So we lost two nuclear submarines during the Cold War, the Thresher and the Scorpion.

20:25We knew what happened to the Thresher. They were out of the shipyard. They had a high pressure weld go and we knew why they died. The Scorpion, on the other hand, was on war patrol and was standing down and was on its way home. And it had nuclear weapons support, nuclear tactical torpedoes. And it just didn't show up. They knew where it was because we could hear it die. We had a secret listening system the Soviets did not have called SOSUS, where we found the sound channel and we could triangulate. So we knew where the Scorpion had died. They went down initially and said it was a pile of stuff on the bottom.

21:00them. So our mission was to go down and map 100 % of the wreckage, find out what the reactors are doing, and see if we're impacting on the environment. And those were my orders. But we were then at the Cold War, and I didn't want the Russians to put a spy satellite on me. So I needed a cover. And because the Titanic was somewhere in between the Thresher and the Scorpion, I said, I'm going to go and search for the Titanic. And that cover story set you up perfectly to actually start hunting for the wreck of the Titanic. You'd developed this debris tracking system for the submarines. And once you'd finished that secret Navy mission, you used it to find the Titanic.

21:46Yes. Mapping the Scorpion told me how to find the Titanic because it had a long debris field. So you find the rough location. then you search for the debris from the wreck which is not what people would normally have done which is look for the actual bulk main part of the wreck so uh with the scorpion i was told it was just a pile of stuff in a circle and what it was was when the submarine imploded the heavy stuff went straight down but the current like separating the wheat from the chaff right went on and on it was a perfectly density and it went on for over one nautical mile and i went wait a minute it, don't look for the Titanic, look for its debris field, because it broke in half, and it was the Labrador current, so it'll be north-south, so I knew instead of mowing the lawn with sonars, what the French and other ones had done, I said, I'm just going to go across with a camera, and then go up a mile, and do it again, and then do it again, and if I don't get it right, I'll interlace it, but on the ninth line, I come in on the debris field, I knew exactly what to do, turned north, and walked me into the Titanic.

22:52And I did it in nine days instead of months and months. Incredible. Well, a few months later, you went back to conduct a detailed survey and take pictures of the Titanic using Elvin and a remotely operated vehicle called Jason Jr. Do you remember your very first trip down to see the wreck? Yes. So we went down and we came in amid ship of the bridge on the starboard side. It was sitting on its keel. And you don't see it right. We saw it on sonar, this big, massive thing in front of us. But when it went visual, we're only maybe 15 meters away. And there was a wall, a giant steel wall in front of us.

23:36And what fascinated me was it was pink and it had no rust because they painted it with anti-felling paint. And then we rose up and we started seeing the portholes and it was like eyes looking at us. It was an amazing first encounter, yes. Incredible. Well, I mean, that discovery certainly generated a huge reaction across global media. Were you prepared for that? Well, I was not a Titanic groupie. I didn't think it would be a big deal. And, oh, boy, was I mistaken. But, no, it was a challenge. Yeah. But your sudden fame did have some positives as well, such as the project it sparked with kids, the Jason project.

24:24Tell me about that. That was amazing. I come home from finding the Titanic and Geographic has me on the media tour and my mom says, too bad you found that rusty old ship. And I come back to my office and it's completely buried in letters. The phone was ringing off the wall and my desk was no longer visible. 16 ,000 letters covered my desk and they all asked the same two questions. Remember, this was about the time of R2-D2 and I had a real robot. And kids said, what do I have to do to do what you do? And then they said, the next time you go, can I go with you? And I thought, why not? So I got together with EDS and National Geographic and Turner Broadcasting, and we created a program.

25:14This is pre-internet, where we went around to museums. We had one in Liverpool. We had Bermuda. We had in Canada and Ontario Science Center, Victoria, throughout the United States. We installed satellite systems on the roof, and we would go to some faraway place, many not underwater. We went to the Amazon. We went to the Arctic. We went all over the world. And for two weeks, we explored and the children would come in buses and they would sit. And we did 16 days of six shows a day for 22 years. I reached 12 million kids. And I always say, study hard. And through my career, I've bumped into many of those 12 million kids that said, I did study hardly now.

26:02PhDs are there. Admiral in the Navy. Amazing encounters. Well, Bob, your work continued. And in 1989, you discovered the wreck of the German battleship Bismarck, an expedition on which your son Todd accompanied you. But tragically, just weeks after that trip, and not long before his 21st birthday, Todd was killed in a car crash. that must have been an incredibly difficult time for you. Still is. I mean, it's, yeah, it's horrible. The worst thing you can have happen to you. You know, it's hard to talk about it, but I'm a spiritual person. And it's like, you know, he's still here. He never leaves me.

26:51Yeah. Wow. Well, perhaps unsurprisingly, after that experience, you threw yourself into work, locating and studying shipwrecks, expanding to include ancient wrecks as well. But in 2002, you joined the University of Rhode Island as a professor of oceanography, your emeritus professor there today. How did you enjoy that new challenge, training up the next generation of ocean explorers? I believe it's my legacy. My Kansas grandma had a wonderful saying, great is the person who plants a tree, knowing they will never sit in its shade. And that's my mission now, to inspire the next generation to follow their passion.

27:37Well, Bob, you went on to found the Ocean Exploration Trust, a non-profit dedicated to marine discovery, currently in its 18th year. And it's achieved some incredible things, conducting more than 150 expeditions, mapping more than a million square kilometres of seafloor, discovering dozens of new species. What's the crew up to at the moment? So we were pulled back from the Mediterranean by our country to do what we call the second Lewis and Clark expedition. So when we declared the exclusive economic zone, All countries now own 200 miles out. So 52 % of the United States is beneath the sea. And so we are mapping and exploring our exclusive economic zone, and it will change the economic engine of our country.

28:30In our country, we're losing all our topsoil. And they say we have less than 50 to 60 harvests before it collapses. So we're going to be more and more dependent upon the ocean to feed us and provide us with what we need. And it'll be called the blue economy. So we are now doing what Lewis and Clark did. But since Lewis and Clark referred to their team as the core of discovery, we call our team the core of exploration. And they're at sea, constantly exploring the new America and helping other nations explore them. We just were working with the Cook Islands and other countries that don't have the technology to help them explore their exclusive economic zone.

29:11So that's the future is the ocean is going to be very important to the human race. I obviously mentioned earlier in the program, Bob, that you're born in 1942. So you're now in your mid 80s. But I don't imagine for a moment that you're ready for a quiet retirement anytime soon. So what's in the pipeline for you? Any dream expeditions you'd like to make happen? I'd love to go to the Indian Ocean. I've never been there. You know why? It has coelacanths. Coelacanths are an ancient, ancient fish that we thought died hundreds of millions of years ago. But a scientist was walking in a market somewhere in the Indian Ocean and saw a coelacanth being sold for food.

29:58and if you look it up it's a weird look it looks like a duckbill platterpush that some like mother nature made a mistake but here's the point it's only found in the indian ocean and if there's a living coelacanth who else is there so can't wait to get to the indian ocean wow well bob your mother might have worried that titanic would eclipse your other scientific achievements but there's plenty of proof to the contrary You've had documentaries made about your work. You've been honoured with the National Humanities Medal from the President of the United States. You published your autobiography, Into the Deep, and even recently had a Navy vessel named after you.

30:40Over all your years working with the ocean, what's meant the most to you? Making discoveries and sharing. It's called the epic journey. You go forth and discover, but the journey is not over till you return and share it, which releases you to go on your next journey. Life is a series of circles within circles within circles. Yeah. So I hear this Navy ship, the USNS Robert Ballard, is now ready. Do you think they're going to let you take it out for a spin? Absolutely. In fact, it's going through sea trials in December and I hope to be aboard inspiring its team. Wonderful stuff. Well, Badan, thank you very much for sharing your Life Scientific.

31:23Pleasure to share it. And thank you for listening. I'm Jamal Kilili and my producer is Lucy Taylor. If you enjoyed listening to this edition of The Life Scientific, why not check out some of our other interviews with leading scientists, exploring everything from space travel to medical breakthroughs. You can access the whole archive of programmes for free via BBC Sounds. Sometimes we all need an extra help in hand, especially with a tricky business problem you've been putting off. Claude is an AI for just that. It's the collaborator that understands your entire workflow and thinks with you, not for you.

31:59And Claude isn't just for quick questions. Hand it a whole task like turning a folder or scattered notes into a report. And it does the work and hands back something finished that you can open and edit. Claude can now draft a doc or deck right in front of you. and Claude Design now lives right inside Claude. Describe the website or prototype you're picturing, attach your design system and it comes back in your own design language ready to edit right on the canvas. It works with your files and the tools you already use like Gmail and Slack and whether you're debugging code at midnight, building a financial model or strategizing your next business move, Claude extends your thinking to tackle the problems that matter.

32:38For problems worth solving, get started with Claude at claude.ai slash solve. That's claude.ai slash solve. And check out Claude Pro, which includes access to all of the features mentioned in today's episode. Claude.ai slash solve. What's the best thing about the holidays? Snow days? Eggnog? How about cash back on just about everything you need to make the holidays feel, well, holiday-y? With Rakuten, you get cash back on gifts for everyone on your list, from stores you love, like Crocs, Neiman Marcus, and Ulta. You save even more when you stack cash back on top of the season's biggest sales. And beyond the gifts, you can save on decor, travel, and maybe a little something for yourself.

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