September 1, 1985, 1:05 a.m., the North Atlantic

Robert Ballard is belowdecks on the R/V Knorr, a 279-foot research vessel owned by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, staring at a bank of screens. He wears a blue cap and a blue shirt and his face is lit by the humming blue glow of the monitors. At forty-three he has completed more than seventy expeditions as an oceanographic explorer and discovered sprawling geologic phenomena, entire species, whole undersea worlds no one knew existed. And now this. Thirteen thousand feet below him, Argo, an underwater search vehicle equipped with a video camera, has captured images of craters—craters that would be inexplicable outside the context of this expedition. Ballard has long been trying to find the wreck of the RMS Titanic. So many men have come looking for the unsinkable boat since it sank in 1912 that Ballard has a decent idea where the massive ship is not. Where it actually came to rest on the ocean floor is a much more difficult proposition. Not so much a needle in a haystack as a needle in a haystack at the bottom of the ocean. In his explorations he has found important vessels, and he will go on to find many more, any one of which would constitute a major find, the capstone of a career. But the Titanic is orders of magnitude different. The Titanic is the Holy Grail.

He discovered the wreck of the German battleship Bismarck too. In 1989, in the North Atlantic.

Of course, the truth is that the Titanic isn't even Ballard's real mission. This is not an Ahab situation, and Ballard is not on a quest. Earlier this year the United States Navy asked Ballard, who is a commander in the reserves, to assist in a secret mission to find two nuclear submarines that had been lost at sea for two decades—they needed to determine whether the subs were releasing radiation into the ocean. And they needed Argo to do it. The Navy told Ballard that if he used Argo to find the lost subs, and if he had any time left over before the Knorr had to get back to port, they would secretly finance his search for the Titanic.

He found the subs, and now here he is in the control room, and images of these impressions on the ocean floor have Ballard wide awake. More than seven decades after the ship's catastrophic collision with an iceberg, could it be that these craters were left by some of its shattered remains?

Argo's camera, the explorer's powerful unblinking eye, closes in. And what it picks up next will alter the course of Bob Ballard's life.

Bob Ballard Ben Sklar

May 2015, morning, Port of Galveston, Texas

Ballard stands on the stern of his ship, the Nautilus, waiting. At seventy-three he stands over six feet tall, he's trim, and his skin is tanned and tight after more than five decades spent mostly at sea. The sun is shining in Galveston this morning, and a breeze drifts across the deck. He's waiting for a group of donors, some of the many financial backers who help make possible his adventures. After a few minutes, an SUV pulls into the vast gray parking lot on the pier next to the ship. A group of Houstonians wearing pressed golf shirts and flowery sundresses has arrived to meet the famous explorer and to get a tour of his ship, and Ballard bounds down the gangway to greet them with smiles and big handshakes all around. He bends at the waist to greet a little girl and ask her name. He leads the group aboard, showing them the way with a large upturned palm and holding the hands of the ladies as they climb from the pier to the deck, gestures he has performed hundreds of times for hundreds of his supporters.

As always he wears his Nautilus uniform, the same outfit every crew member on board is issued: navy-blue polo shirt with a gold compass insignia. Underneath it reads E/V Nautilus. Not R/V, because Nautilus is not a research vessel. Research vessels set out to prove hypotheses, which, if you ask Bob Ballard, can be a little redundant. You're proving something you already pretty much know. No, the Nautilus is an exploration vessel, like it says on the shirts: E/V.

He wears a matching navy-blue cap. No name, no rank. All the blue polo shirts and caps are the same. The point is, everybody on the Nautilus is important. Fifty-five percent of his staff (his "corps") are women—a Ballard mandate—and an even higher percentage are students at some stage of their undergraduate or graduate studies in oceanography, geology, biology, archaeology, engineering, or filmmaking. ("You don't have to pay 'em," he says of the students.) You get to issue mandates when you are president of the trust that you created and that owns the ship, as Ballard is. The Ocean Exploration Trust. His trust. His ship. His responsibility.

Money is a frequent topic of conversation for Ballard, because it takes $10 million annually to keep the Nautilus in the water for four to six months every year. (Similar vessels, he says, cost six times that.) Ballard's unique position as an oceanographer/owner makes him both liberated and beholden. For that money that frees him to explore, Ballard must regularly court private donors, corporate sponsors, and politicians who believe in his mission enough to fight for public dollars. The donors love to hear about the Titanic. The politicians are guided by an interest in everything from Ballard's commitment to education to his exploration of the earth's crust.

These days, empirical findings have become the slings and arrows in some very nasty and subjective debates. And the scientific method, which has been the wellspring for so much of America's greatness, now seems to be turning the country against itself. In this atmosphere, Bob Ballard and his relentless quest to master the ocean bottom have, improbably, become the basis for a broad political consensus. Rep. John Culberson, a Republican from Houston and chair of the House Appropriations subcommittee on commerce, justice, and science, has won millions of dollars of financial backing for the Ocean Exploration Program run by NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which supports Ballard's trust. The congressman is intensely interested in Ballard's work discovering natural resources in the nation's exclusive economic zone (EEZ), a collar of ocean floor along U.S. coastlines to which it owns exploration rights. "Dr. Ballard's the first scientist I'm aware of that's made a concerted effort to map the EEZ and catalog the mineral resources there," he says. "China's cleaning our clock in locking up 97 percent of the world's rare-earth elements, controlling vital resources, and positioning itself to become the superpower of the twenty-first and twenty-second centuries. So Dr. Ballard is an easy sell to my colleagues, Republican and Democrat."

After Ballard finishes the tour for the wealthy Houstonians—nice folks, good time—he is sitting in his quarters, a sparse wood-paneled room above deck with a bunk, a desk, and two framed illustrations from his favorite book, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, on the walls. His phone buzzes with an incoming email. He fastens his glasses, the kind that snap apart at the bridge, and scrolls down.

"Oohhhh, wow. Yes! Yes! God bless him. The House has already . . . now the Senate . . . Yes!"

It's an email from a contact in Washington. Ballard and his team have been waiting to hear about a major funding request from Culberson's committee, and the chairman has come through.

"Yes! I just have to sit here for a minute."

He drums his fingers on the table, his mind racing. Claps a few claps into the air.

"That is absolutely huge. Oh, man. Culberson gets it."

Ballard (in hat) on the nuclear sub NR-1 searching for geothermal vents near Iceland for National Geographic in 1985. Getty Images

Titanic brought him fame and a little fortune and the promise of a career as long as he wanted one. He wrote a cover story for National Geographic, where he was an explorer in residence. And yet it was a discovery of a known thing. Ballard seems prouder of his discoveries of the prizes for which he was not looking—the prizes you win, he says, by spending "time on the bottom." In 1977 he discovered the very existence of hydrothermal vents, hot springs in the ocean floor near where tectonic plates move apart from one another, releasing a steady flow of superheated water from deep in the earth's crust. The water is a chaotic mess of mineral-rich fluids including sulfide that, when discharged into the frigid, pressurized water on the ocean floor, can create new ecosystems hospitable to a wild mix of creatures. In the worlds of marine biology and geology, it was a monumental discovery. In the actual world, nobody much noticed.

He discovered the wreck of the German battleship Bismarck too. In 1989, in the North Atlantic. He discovered the wreck of PT-109, JFK's World War II boat, in 2002. The naval ships sunk at Guadalcanal. He was first to explore the Lusitania. But the Titanic is what keeps the people showing up. The Titanic is why yesterday three hundred local schoolchildren flocked to the Nautilus to meet Ballard and to run around his ship.

He holds his thumb and forefinger close together. "In all my discoveries, just that much."

"When I found hydrothermal vents, no kid wrote me a letter," he says. "The Titanic was my seventieth expedition. But when I got back from the Titanic, I couldn't see my desk. The mail that came in—they poured it on my desk while I was still at sea. I said, what is this? They said, it's kids. And they were all saying the same thing: What do I have to do to do what you do?"

Ballard thought a lot about those letters. Thought about what he could do with this knowledge that there were children out there who wanted to be a famous explorer, which he suddenly was. He was forty-three. Born in Kansas into a hard-living family ("My grandfather was shot in a gunfight") and raised middle class in California, he had become a respected oceanographer and a commander in the Navy. He had clawed through the publish-or-perish tenure process in academia and earned job security at the University of Rhode Island. But now he was the man who had found the Titanic, and he would be for the rest of his life and well after his death. He didn't have to give lectures or coauthor papers. He did, however, want to teach.

The letters from children gave him an idea: With the right technology, maybe he could teach from the sea.

Ben Sklar

Not just any oceanographer gets to have his own ship.

Nautilus is a 211-foot former East German research vessel, built in 1967, that Ballard has so far spent $15 million reconditioning and outfitting as an exploration vessel. It carries seventeen crew and thirty-one scientists and operations specialists. On the ship's stern sits a winch the size of a Volkswagen that is used for raising and lowering Ballard's two remotely operated vehicles (ROVs), Hercules and Argus, between the ship and the ocean floor—the winches can release more than forty-eight hundred meters of steel cable into the sea. Belowdecks, he has installed remote command centers throughout the ship—small, darkened rooms with a jumble of screens on the walls that constitute the nervous system of this whole operation, allowing Ballard and his crew to show the world what the ocean floor looks like. Mankind has only ever seen less than 10 percent of the ocean floor, which is not very much at all, if you ask Bob Ballard.

Ballard is usually on board for one month a year. The rest of the time, he is tethered to the Nautilus by technology from his home in Connecticut or his office in Rhode Island. He has many more expeditions behind him than in front of him, and that creates a tense urgency in a man. Especially a man who appreciates the coefficient of his mortality, and knows by now that his ambition will outpace his life by a hundredfold, which is a startling discovery all its own. But to watch him aboard his ship is to witness a man possessed by the possibility of what he might find tomorrow. At this particular moment he is standing on the deck of the Nautilus in Galveston, 8:00 a.m., the sun trying to burn through a morning haze. In three weeks his ship will steam south through the Gulf of Mexico, through the Panama Canal, and down to the Galapagos Islands, where Ballard will revisit the site of the hydrothermal vents and "black smokers" he and his team discovered in 1977.

"You can't discover unless you're exploring. It's time. What are you looking at? A whole lotta nothing. Turn the corner. Boom! We never knew there were black smokers at 650 Fahrenheit coming out—till we turned the corner," he says. "It's all about being there so you can get lucky. And you have to do it as cheaply as possible."

It's hard to imagine that Magellan ever had occasion to say Boom! Harder still to imagine Columbus squiring Isabella aboard the Santa Maria to show how her money was being spent. But with every molecule of dry land now surveilled from space, this is how Ballard describes how the Nautilus is set up to handle the boom moments that come with discovering all that remains to be discovered in the three-dimensional chess of the oceans deep:

"It's like an emergency room. What's going to come in on an ambulance to the ER at two in the morning? You have no idea. So, how are you going to deal with that uncertainty? Well, you have some people there to do triage and keep the person alive. But then what do you do when you need a specific expert? You have doctors on call, and you call the right one for the situation: 'Get in here.' That's how we run this ship. When we find something, we call the right expert."

Ballard has assembled, over the years, an astonishing roster of experts in many fields, all volunteers. When the -Nautilus is at sea, towing its cameras through the depths, and it finds something interesting, the crew needs to know whether to stop and explore further or move on. And they can't keep fifty experts on board at all times. So the Nautilus has a phone system with a 401 area code. "The ship thinks it's in Rhode Island at all times, no matter where on the planet it is," Ballard says. "When we need an expert, we just pick up the phone. It goes like this: 'Hi, Deb? I know it's 2:00 a.m. on Sunday morning, but can you boot up your laptop? We got something. We wanna know what it is. The ship is hovering in twenty thousand feet of water wondering, up or down?' And we do this literally all the time. All. The. Time. Within twenty minutes we have to deliver the brightest mind in America on whatever subject it is to the spot of the discovery to tell us what to do. If you tell us go, we go into a response strategy," Ballard says, jutting his chin into the breeze. "It's an unbelievable feeling. The closest thing to a drug for me is Coke Zero. I don't drink coffee, I don't smoke. I do have wine. But you can't beat the thrill of finding something on the bottom. And I'll wait and wait and wait for it. We just had one on the last trip!"

That one went like this:

"We're down in the Lesser Antilles, in Grenada. A volcano called Kick'em Jenny is down here. Two plates going at it. It's the only active underwater volcano along the Lesser Antilles. We're looking at it, and we have this brand-new sonar on the ship that can make amazing maps—$3 million mapping sonar, because you need maps. We can go to any place on the planet and make digitized maps of the ocean floor.

"We noticed that Kick'em Jenny collapsed in itself and set off a big avalanche. Okay, big deal. Volcanologist says, Okay, but I wanna go down to the bottom of the avalanche and pick up some rocks. Fine. Well, it's the last day of the season, we had done everything we wanted to do. We told the National Geographic film crew to leave. We were doing a show, they had been with us for four months, but we told them we were just gonna go down and pick up some rocks. What do you expect to be down at the base of an undersea landslide? Rocks. But! Surprise. We head down the hill and we come across this river coming out of the side of the avalanche. What is this? It's a river. I know it's a river, dummy, but how do you make a river in an avalanche at the bottom of the ocean? And it's funny--colored. And it's pretty violent. We ran up to the command center.

"It starts off acting like an avalanche. But then—what's that? I dunno. Never seen an avalanche leak. It's like someone took a knife and cut across it. We're seeing all these shells and black stuff . . . an entire community of life here! It's chemosynthesizing"—chemosynthesis being the process of microorganisms creating energy brought about by chemical reactions rather than the sun, as in photosynthesis. "Worms, brittle stars. This is at five thousand feet. I'm feeling very stupid right now. Gigantic mussels. Fourteen inches! Weird parasites living in them, bleeding blood, ghastly—like Tron!

"We said, Whaaa? Working hypothesis: We're off the Orinoco, which is the Mississippi of South America. Full of organics. And the avalanche squashed it and squeezed out methane—we think—and they're using chemosynthesis to process the methane into energy. Well, we had about a thousand scientists on the phone in twenty minutes. And they all said, go down! No one had ever seen this. How many avalanches are there in the ocean? Lots. But no one had ever gone down the bottom of an avalanche to see. So how many of these things have we missed? Lots. It's like Christopher Columbus coming back with this thing and saying, 'We're calling this a pine cone.' Well, how many do you think there are? 'Lots.' "

It was a major discovery.

Ballard steps back, leans on the gunwale of his ship, shaking his head just a little in amazement. His eyes are wide open. Behind them, his mind is somewhere else. His mind is five thousand feet under the Atlantic Ocean, off the mouth of the Orinoco River.

"You can't beat that."

Time on the bottom.

Sonar upgrades mean that programs can instantly provide high-resolution videos aboard the Nautilus Ben Sklar

Long ago, long before even the Nautilus, Ballard had figured out how to teach from the sea. In 1989 he launched the JASON project, an ocean-centric educational initiative that has reached more than fifteen million American schoolchildren. (JASON Jr. was the submersible vehicle Ballard piloted to explore the Titanic itself in 1986.) At the center of his vision is an experience known as telepresence, which uses a mash of technologies to create a hyperreal version of virtual reality, in which a person has the sensation that he or she is on the bottom of the ocean—or in a rain forest or a desert, or on Madison Avenue—when in fact the environment is being re-created around him using high-definition projection and sound capture.

James Cameron, who first met Ballard in the late 1980s at Woods Hole and whose path would cross Ballard's again when he directed Titanic the movie in 1997—he calls Ballard "a dynamo"—felt the sensation while exploring the famous wreck, sending remote-controlled cameras inside the ship while he sat inside the Mir submersible. "After several hours inside a small, nimble vehicle, you form a kind of cognitive loop with that vehicle," Cameron says. "You begin to interpret the image you're seeing on the video camera as if it's sensory input of a different nature. You start to get this kind of synesthesia effect, where interpreting the visual image starts to become kind of bodily, sensory input. Your consciousness now seems to reside inside the vehicle, and I remember a very curious sensation. I turned the [remote camera] vehicle to look back at the Mir submersible. I was sitting inside the Mir submersible at the time, but I thought, oh, there's the Mir submersible over there, far away from where I am—and yet I was physically in the Mir submersible! My mind had so seamlessly transplanted itself into the remote vehicle that I now thought of myself as being outside the Mir submersible looking back at it. That's how profound the telepresence experience can be."

Nautilus is equipped with telepresence technology, but because most classrooms are not, Ballard delivers to students what he can using the capabilities they have in common. Last year crew members aboard the Nautilus broadcast five hundred live dispatches—Ballard calls them "shows"—to classrooms, museums, and science centers via interactive streaming video, so students can ask questions and get answers on the spot. Producers at the Inner Space Center at URI's Center for Ocean Exploration and Archaeological Oceanography add video and graphics as the crew talks. The students witness the discoveries, and the trust uses the curriculum—which is free to schools—to attract sponsors who make it possible.

"People don't care about the oceans, really," Ballard says, sitting in his office back at URI, the waters of Narragansett Bay shining out the windows. "This is all about motivating kids to study harder. America is a star-based system. We worship individualism. I'm a star because I found the Titanic. Not because I found hydrothermal vents. So okay, go with it. I don't sell kids and parents on the ocean. I sell them being a star."

Ben Sklar

Every day he's home, around five o'clock Ballard and his wife, Barbara, sit outside and watch the sun set over the Connecticut River. Bob fixes something as an hors d'oeuvre, Barbara pours them each a glass of wine, and they talk about the day. They eat dinner together every night, with their two children too, when the kids aren't at boarding school or college. This family time is essential. Ballard's father is dead ("He was an orphan"), and his mother ("God bless her") is ninety-eight and lives in California, where she cares for Bob's disabled sister, who is sixty-eight. His brother died of Crohn's disease a few years ago. A son from a previous marriage was killed in a car accident, a devastating loss that Ballard can't really talk about. Family is important to Ballard, because he doesn't have much.

And yet there are times, after dinner or early in the morning, when Barbara knows her husband's mind is someplace else. She knows his mind is at sea. He can call up his ship's live video stream on its website, nautiluslive.org, any time, even on his phone—anyone can—and instantly he is on board, in the command center, staring at the ocean floor.

"You're not here, are you?" she'll say to him. And he'll just smile.

He works in fifteen-year bursts of creativity. Fifteen-year projects, he calls them. He is seven years into Nautilus. And he already knows what he wants to do next. "That'll be my last one," he says. But whatever the project, he is determined to see as much of the ocean floor as he can before he dies. "I got addicted to it. In my fifty-five years of exploring, how much of the ocean floor have I seen?" He holds his thumb and forefinger close together. "In all my discoveries, just that much." His eyes grow wide. "So how much have I not seen?"

Back in Galveston, he is standing in the ship's stern, opening a can of Coke Zero, an unfinished one at his feet. "Jeez, I've got one here I haven't even finished yet. It's like a smoker who lights a new cigarette with the one that's still burning."

He sits down in the pilot seat of Hercules, his tanned, weather-beaten hands resting on the robot's massive, shiny claws, not talking, an unusual motionless moment for him on this boat. The Port of Galveston is perfectly quiet. On the channel, a tern is challenging a pelican for the morning catch.

"My grandmother had all these sayings," he says quietly. "And when I was raising my kids, they started to come out. They've asked me to start writing them down, so I'm doing that."

He is studying the tern as it antagonizes the much larger bird, which seems unperturbed. Their dance is the only movement along the harborside.

" 'Never get into the thick of thin things,' " he says. "I love that." He smiles and stares down at the gray water, conjuring other pieces of wisdom.

" 'Great is the person who plants a tree knowing he will never sit in its shade.' " He looks up, nods a quick nod, his eyebrows raised. "That's education. That's the long haul."

It's time to go. Galveston is an accommodating way station for the Nautilus, but Ballard's team is waiting to go over the plan for the rest of the expedition. Fifty-five years in, the new world below the depths still awaits.

This story appears in the September 2015 issue of Popular Mechanics.

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