On exploring the oceans - Robert Ballard

The first question is this: Our country has two exploration programs. One is NASA, with a mission to explore the great beyond, to explore the heavens, which we all want to go to, if we're lucky. You can see we have Sput and we have a Saturn, and we have other manifestations of space exploration.

Well, there's also another program that is in another agency within our government in ocean exploration. It's in NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. My question is this: Why are we ignoring the oceans? Here's the reason, or not the reason, but here's why I asked that question. If you compare NASA's annual budget to explore the heavens, that's one year's budget, that would fund NOAA's budget to explore the oceans for 1,600 years. Why? Why are we looking up? Is it because it's heaven and hell is down here? Is it a cultural issue? Why are people afraid of the ocean, or do they just assume the ocean is just a dark, gloomy place that has nothing to offer?

I'm going to take you on a 16-minute trip on 72% of the planet, so buckle up. What we're going to do is immerse ourselves in my world, and what I'm going to try to—I hope I make the following point, so I'm going to make it right now in case I forget—is that everything I'm going to present to you was not in my textbooks when I went to school. Most of it was not even in my college textbooks. I'm a geophysicist, and in all my earth science books when I was a student, I had to give the wrong answer to get an A.

We used to ridicule continental drift; it was something we laughed at. We learned Marshall Kay's Gsin clinal cycle, which is a bunch of crap, but in today's context, it was a bunch of crap. It was the law of geology, vertical tectonics. All the things we're going to walk through in our explorations and discoveries of the oceans were mostly discoveries made by accident. We were looking for something and found something else, and everything we're going to talk about represents a 1/1 of 1% glimpse because that's all we've seen.

I have a characterization; this is a characterization of what it would look like if you could remove the water. It gives you the false impression it's a map; it is not a map. In fact, I commonly ask people—I have another version at my office—and I ask people, "Why are there mountains here in this area, but there are none over here?" They go, "Well, gee." They try to say, "Is it a fracture zone? Is it a hot spot?" No, no, that's the only place a ship's been. Most of the southern hemisphere is unexplored. We had more exploration ships down there during Captain Cook's time than we do now. It's amazing.

So we're going to immerse ourselves in the 72% of the planet, because you know, it's really naive to think that the Easter Bunny put all the resources on the continents. You know, it's just ludicrous. We are always constantly playing this zero-sum game. You know, "We're going to do this; we're going to take it away from something else." I believe in just enriching the economy, and we're leaving so much on the table—72% of the planet.

As I will point out later in the presentation, 50% of the United States of America lies beneath the sea. Fifty percent of our country that we own, have all legal jurisdiction, have all rights to do whatever we want, lies beneath the sea, and we have better maps of Mars than that 50%. Why?

Okay, now I began my explorations the hard way. Back then, this was—I actually—that's it: My first expedition was when I was 17 years old, 49 years ago. Do the math; I'm 66. I went out to sea on a ship and we almost got sunk by a giant rogue wave. I was too young to be—you know, I thought it was great. I was a body surfer, and I thought, "Wow, that was an incredible wave," and we almost sank the ship. But I became enraptured with mounting expeditions, and over the last 49 years I've done about 120. I keep doing them.

In the early days, the only way I could get to the bottom was to crawl into a submarine, a very small submarine, and go down to the bottom. I've dove in a whole series of different deep-diving submersibles: Alvin, Sea Cliff, and Siana, and all the major deep submersibles we have, which are about eight. In fact, on a good day, we might have four or five human beings at the average depth of the earth—maybe four or five human beings out of whatever billions we've got going. It's very difficult to get there if you do it physically.

But I was enraptured back in my graduate years; it was the dawn of plate tectonics, and we realized that the greatest mountain range on Earth lay beneath the sea. The mid-ocean ridge runs around like the seam in a baseball. This is on a MADA projection, but if you were to put it on an equal area projection, you'd see that the mid-ridge covers 23% of the Earth's total surface area. Almost a quarter of our planet is a single mountain range, and we didn't enter it until after Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin went to the moon.

So we went to the moon, played golf up there, before we went to the largest feature on our own planet. Our interest in this mountain range, as earth scientists in those days, was not only because of its tremendous size dominating the planet but the role it plays in the genesis of the outer skin. It's along the axis of the mid-ocean ridge where the great crust plates are separating. Like a living organism, you tear open; it bleeds; its molten blood rises up to heal that wound from the asthenosphere, hardens, forms new tissue, and moves laterally.

But no one had actually gone down into the actual site of the boundary of creation, as we called it, into the rift valley until a group of seven of us crawled in our little submarines in the summer of 1973-1974 and were the first human beings to enter the Great Rift Valley. We went down into the rift valley. This is all accurate, except for one thing: it's pitch black. It's absolutely pitch black because photons cannot reach the average depth of the ocean. The average depth is 12,000 feet; in the rift valley, it's 9,000 feet. Most of our planet does not feel the warmth of the sun. Most of our planet is in eternal darkness, and for that reason, you do not have photosynthesis in the deep sea.

With the absence of photosynthesis, you have no plant life, and as a result, you have very little animal life living in this underworld—or so we thought. In our initial expedition, we were totally focused on exploring the boundary of creation, looking at the volcanic features running along that entire 42,000 miles. Running along this entire 42,000 miles are tens of thousands of active volcanoes—tens of thousands of active volcanoes.

There are more active volcanoes beneath the sea than on land by two orders of magnitude. So it's a phenomenally active region. It's not just a dark, boring place; it's a very alive place, and it's then being ripped open. We were dealing with a particular scientific issue back then. We couldn't understand why you had a mountain under tension. In plate tectonic theory, we knew that if you had plates collide, it made sense they would crush into one another; you would thicken the crust, you'd uplift it. That's why you get—you know, you get seashells up on Mount Everest. It's not a flood; it was pushed up there.

We understood mountains under compression, but we could not understand why we had a mountain under tension. It should not be until one of my colleagues said, "It looks to me like a thermal blister," and the mid-ocean ridge must be a cooling curve. We said, "Let's go find out." We punched a bunch of heat probes; everything made sense, except at the axis there was missing heat. There was missing heat; it was hot, but it wasn't hot enough.

So we came up with multiple hypotheses. There were little green people down there taking it; there were all sorts of things going on. But the only logical was that there were hot springs; there must be underwater hot springs. We mounted an expedition to look for the missing heat, and so we went along this mountain range in an area along the Gpu's rift. Did we find the missing heat? It was amazing. These giant chimneys—huge giant chimneys—went up to them with our submersible.

We wanted to get a temperature probe; we stuck it in there, looked at it, and it went pegged off scale. The pilot made this great observation: "That's hot." Then we realized our probe was made out of the same stuff; it could have melted. But it turns out the exiting temperature was 650°F—hot enough to melt lead. This is what a real one looks like on the W to Fukash Ridge. What you're looking at is an incredible pipe organ of chemicals coming out of the ocean. Everything you see in this picture is commercial-grade copper, lead, silver, zinc, and gold.

So the Easter Bunny has put things in the ocean floor, and you have massive heavy metal deposits that we're making. In this mountain range, we're making huge discoveries of large commercial-grade ore. But it was dwarfed—was dwarfed—by what we discovered. We discovered a profusion of life in a world that should not exist—giant tube worms, 10 feet tall. I remember having to use vodka—my own vodka—to pickle it, 'cause we don't carry formaldehyde.

We went and found these incredible clam beds sitting on the barren rock—large clams—and when we opened them, they didn't look like a clam. When we cut them open, they didn't have the anatomy of a clam—no mouth, no gut, no digestive system. They had inside them; their bodies had been totally taken over by another organism, a bacterium, that had figured out how to replicate photosynthesis in the dark through a process we now call chemosynthesis. None of it in our textbooks; none of us in our textbooks.

We did not know about this life system; we were not predicting it. We stumbled on it looking for some missing heat. So we wanted to accelerate this process. We wanted to get away from this silly trip up and down in a submarine: average depth of the ocean, 12,000 feet, two and a half hours to get to work in the morning, two and a half hours to get home—a five-hour commute to work, three hours of bottom time, average distance traveled, one mile on a 42,000-mile mountain range. Great job security, but not the way to go.

So I began designing a new technology of telepresence, using robotic systems to replicate myself so I wouldn't have to cycle my vehicle system. We began to introduce that in our explorations and continued to make phenomenal discoveries with our new robotic technologies. Again, looking for something else, moving from one part of the mid-ocean ridge to another, we were off the scientists—were off at—and they came across incredible life forms. They came across new creatures they had not seen before, but more importantly, they discovered edifices down there that they did not understand. They did not make sense; they were not above a MAG chamber; they shouldn't be there.

We called it Lost City, and Lost City was characterized by these incredible limestone formations and upside-down pools. Look at that—how do you do that? That's water upside down. We went in underneath it, tapped it, and we found that it had the pH of Drano—pH 11. And yet it had chemosynthetic bacteria living in it in this extreme environment. Other hydrothermal vents were in an acidic environment all the way at the other end—in an alkaline environment—with a pH of 11. Life existed. Life was much more creative than we had ever thought. Again discovered by accident.

Just two years ago, working off Santorini, where people are sunning themselves on the beach, unbeknownst to them in the caldera nearby, we found phenomenal hydrothermal vent systems and another more life systems. This was two miles from where people go to sunbathe, and they were oblivious to the existence of this system. Again, you know, we stop at the water's edge. Recently, diving off in the Gulf of Mexico, finding pools of water—not upside down, right-side up—bingo! You think you're in air until your fish swims by.

You're looking at brine pools formed by salt diapirs. There was methane; I'd never seen volcanoes of methane. Instead of belching out lava, they were belching out big, big bubbles of methane, and they were creating these volcanoes, and there were flows—not of lava, but of the mud—coming out of the earth, driven by methane. I had never seen this before.

Moving on, there's more than just natural history beneath the sea—human history. Our discoveries of the Titanic, the realization that the deep sea is the largest museum on Earth. It contains more history than all the museums on land combined, and yet we're only now penetrating it. Finding the state of preservation, when we found the Bismarck at 16,000 feet, we then found the Yorktown. People always ask, "Did you find the right ship?" This said "Yorktown" on the stern.

More recently, finding ancient history—how many ancient mariners have had a bad day? The number is a million. We've been discovering these along ancient trade routes where they're not supposed to be. This shipwreck sank 100 years before the birth of Christ; this one sank carrying a prefabricated Home Depot Roman Temple.

And then here's one that sank at the time of Homer, at 750 BC. More recently into the Black Sea, where we're exploring because there's no oxygen there. It's the largest reservoir of hydrogen sulfide on Earth. Shipwrecks are perfectly preserved. All their organics are perfectly preserved. We begin to excavate them. We expect to start hauling out the bodies in perfect condition, with their DNA.

Look at the state of preservation: still the ad mark of a carpenter's. Look at the state of those artifacts; you still see the beeswax dripping when they dropped; they sealed it. This ship sank 1,500 years ago. Fortunately, we've been able to convince Congress; we begin to go on the hill and lobby, and we stole recently a ship from the United States Navy—the Okeanos Explorer. Its mission is as good as you could get; its mission is to go where no one has gone before on planet Earth.

I was looking at it yesterday; it's up in Seattle, okay? It comes online—it comes online this summer—and it begins its journey of exploration. But we have no idea what we're going to find when we go out there with our technology, but certainly, it's going to the unknown America. This is that part of the United States that lies beneath the sea. We own all of that blue, and yet, like I say, particularly the western territorial trusts—we don't have maps of them. We don't have maps of them.

We have maps of Venus, but not of the western territorial trusts. The way we're going to run this, we have no idea what we're going to discover. We have no idea what we're going to discover. We're going to discover an ancient shipwreck—a Phoenician off Brazil, or a new rock formation, or new life.

So we're going to run it like an emergency hospital. We're going to connect our command center via a high-bandwidth satellite link to a building we're building at the University of Rhode Island called the Interspace Center. Within that, we're going to run it just like you run a nuclear submarine—blue gold teams switching them off and on, running 24 hours a day. A discovery is made; that discovery is instantly seen in the command center a second later, but then it’s connected through the internet to the new internet highway that makes Internet One look like a dirt road on the information highway with 10 gigabits of bandwidth.

We'll go into areas we have no knowledge of; it's a big blank sheet on our planet. We'll map it within hours and have the maps disseminated out to the major universities. It turns out that 90% of all the oceanographic intellect in this country is at 12 universities; they're all on I2. We can then build a command center. This is a remote center at the University of Washington; she's talking to the pilot—she's 5,000 miles away, but she's assumed command.

But the beauty of this too is we can then disseminate it to children. We can disseminate—they can follow this expedition. I've started a program—thank you, where are you, Jim?—Jim Young helped. We started a program called the Jason Project. More recently, we've started a program with the Boys and Girls Clubs of America so that we can use exploration and the excitement of live exploration to motivate them and excite them, and then give them what they're already ready for.

I would not let an adult drive my robot; you don't have enough gaming experience. But I will let a kid with no license take over control of my vehicle system because we want to create the classroom of tomorrow. We have stiff competition, and we need to motivate, and it's all being done. You win or lose an engineer or a scientist by eighth grade; the game is not over—it's over by the eighth grade; it's not beginning.

We need to be not only proud of our universities; we need to be proud of our middle schools. When we have the best middle schools in the world, we'll have the best kids pumped out of that system. Let me tell you, because this is what we want. This is what we want. This is a young lady—not watching a football game, not watching a basketball game—watching exploration live from thousands of miles away, and it's just dawning on her what she's seeing.

When you get a jaw drop, you can inform—you can put so much information into that mind; it's in full reset mode, and that's this. I hope this will be a future engineer or a future scientist in the battlefield for truth. And my final question—my final question: Why are we not looking at moving out onto the sea? Why do we have programs to build a habitation on Mars, and we have programs to look at colonizing the moon, but we do not have a program looking at how we colonize our own planet? The technology is at hand.

Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.