On the Galapagos spreading center east of the islands a 1977 exploration by Alvin found deep-sea hydrothermal vents and surrounding biology communities based on chemosynthesis. ĭuring the summer of 1975, Ballard participated in a joint French-American expedition called Phere searching for hydrothermal vents over the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, but the expedition did not find any active vents. īallard was geologist diver in Alvin during Project FAMOUS, which explored the median rift valley of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge in 1974. It used an air gun that sent sound waves underwater to determine the underlying structure of the ocean floor and the submersible Alvin, which was used to find and recover a sample from the bedrock. In summer 1970, he began a field mapping project of the Gulf of Maine for his doctoral dissertation. Marine geologyīallard's first dive in a submersible was in the Ben Franklin (PX-15) in 1969 off the coast of Florida during a Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution expedition. He retired from the Navy as a commander in 1995 after reaching the statutory service limit. After completing his active duty obligation in 1970, he was returned to reserve status, where he remained for much of his military career, being called up only for mandatory training and special assignments. His request was approved, and he was transferred to the Navy Reserve on the reserve active duty list. When called to active duty in 1967, he asked to fulfill his obligation in the United States Navy. He was designated as an intelligence officer and initially received a commission as a second lieutenant in the Army Reserve. Military careerīallard joined the United States Army in 1965 through the Army's Reserve Officers Training program. Four years later he received a PhD in marine geology and geophysics at the University of Rhode Island. Īfter leaving active duty and entering into the Naval Reserve in 1970, Ballard continued working at Woods Hole persuading organizations and people, mostly scientists, to fund and use Alvin for undersea research. The Navy assigned him as a liaison between the Office of Naval Research and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Woods Hole, Massachusetts.
Upon his request, he was transferred from the Army into the US Navy as an oceanographer. īallard was working towards a PhD in marine geology at the University of Southern California in 1967 when he was called to active duty. Subsequently, he returned to Andreas Rechnitzer's Ocean Systems Group at North American Aviation. His first graduate degree ( MS, 1966) was in geophysics from the University of Hawaiʻi's Institute of Geophysics where he trained porpoises and whales. While a student in Santa Barbara, California, he joined Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity, and also completed the US Army's ROTC program, giving him an Army officer's commission in Army Intelligence. In 1965, Ballard graduated from the University of California, Santa Barbara, earning undergraduate degrees in chemistry and geology. At North American, Ballard worked on its failed proposal to build the submersible Alvin for the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. : 27–30īeginning in 1962, Ballard worked part-time with Andreas Rechnitzer's Ocean Systems Group at North American Aviation, where his father was the chief engineer of North American's Minuteman missile program. : 21–24 Ballard enrolled at University of California, Santa Barbara, and joined the Army Reserve Officer Training Corps. : 19–20 While he was a high school student, his father connected him with oceanographers at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, and he participated in several short research expeditions. : 15 He has attributed his early interest in underwater exploration to watching the film 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, an adaptation of Jules Verne’s 1870 novel. When Ballard was two years old, his family moved to southern California, where his father worked as a flight test engineer. He had an older brother, Richard, and younger sister, Nancy Ann. Robert Duane Ballard was born on J : 192 in Wichita, Kansas. Ballard has also established the JASON Project and leads ocean exploration on the research vessel E/V Nautilus.
Kennedy's PT-109 in 2002 and visited Biuku Gasa and Eroni Kumana, who saved its crew.ĭespite his long successes in shipwrecks, Ballard considers his most important discovery to be that of hydrothermal vents. He is best known for the discoveries of the wrecks of the RMS Titanic in 1985, the battleship Bismarck in 1989, and the aircraft carrier USS Yorktown in 1998. Robert Duane Ballard (born June 30, 1942) is an American retired Navy officer and a professor of oceanography at the University of Rhode Island who is most noted for his work in underwater archaeology: maritime archaeology and archaeology of shipwrecks.
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