A PRESENTATION ON:DR.ROBERT BALLARD

Submitted by:-Anupama Manisha Lakra Semester VI

CUJ/I/2014/IMC/19

Submitted to:-Sudarshan yadav Assistant professor

Centre for mass communication

BIOGRAPHY:

ROBERT BALLARD

Robert Ballard is a retired United States Navy officer and a professor of oceanography at the University of Rhode Island.

He is a great oceanographer and a marine geologist. Born on June 30, 1942 in Wichita, Kansas, United States, but grew up in

San Diego, California,  where a childhood fascination with tidal pools and marine life led him to study marine geology.

In 1962, when he was only 19 years old, his father, a missile scientist at North American Aviation, helped him get a job at the aerospace company’s Ocean Systems Group. The company was competing for a contract to build a three-man deep-ocean submersible. In later years, Ballard was to spend much of his career in such a vessel, known as ALVIN.

Ballard earned undergraduate degrees in chemistry and geology at the University of California at Santa Barbara in 1965.

While at Santa Barbara he participated in the Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC). The Navy assigned the young geologist to Woods Hole Oceanographic Research Institute in Massachusetts, where he continued his work in deep submergence. After leaving the Navy, he returned to Woods Hole as a research fellow.

He completed his MS in geophysics from the university of Hawaii in 1966. He earned a Ph.D. in geology and geophysics in 1974 from university of

southern California and went to work at Woods Hole as a full-time marine scientist.

Awards- Academy of Achievements' Golden Plate Award(1990), kibly International Award(1994), Lone Sailor Award(1996), Caird Award(2002).

In 2003, President George W. Bush presented him with the National Endowment for the Humanities Medal in a ceremony at the White House.

Today, Robert Ballard is an Explorer in Residence at the National Geographic Society. He is also President of Ocean Exploration Trust, the Institute for Exploration in Mystic, Connecticut; Scientist Emeritus at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution; and Director of the Institute for Archaeological Oceanography at the University of Rhode Island.

CONTRIBUTIONS: His first major expedition, was the first to perform successful field

mapping underwater. Ballard and his team explored the undersea mountain range known as the Mid-Atlantic Ridge.

In these expeditions, Ballard discovered that the entire volume of the earth’s oceans is, over a period of years, recycled through the earth’s crust. This phenomenon explained the mineral composition of sea water for the first time.

This stage of Ballard’s career climaxed with the landmark discovery of thermal vents off the Galápagos Islands. Ballard and his crewmates found that plants here synthesize food energy chemically, rather than from sunlight, through photosynthesis, as all other vegetation on land and sea does. This discovery has enormous implications for the possibility of life on other planets, as well as here on Earth

Ballard was also among the first to see the “black smokers,” submarine volcanoes in the Pacific Rise, whose emissions are hot enough to melt lead.

Not satisfied with the possibilities of undersea research offered by the slow-moving submersible ALVIN, Ballard developed ANGUS (Acoustically Navigated Geological Underwater Survey), a submersible camera which could remain at the ocean floor for 12 to 14 hours, and take up to 16,000 photographs in a single lowering.

Ballard discovered the sunken hulk of RMS Titanic . Drawing on all of Ballard’s accumulated expertise in undersea exploration, he and his crew located the wreck, more than two miles beneath the waves of the North Atlantic, on September 1, 1985.

On subsequent expeditions, Ballard perfected the ARGO/JASON system, using it to locate the German battleship Bismarck, sunk in World War II, and the passenger liner Lusitania, sunk by a German torpedo during World War I.

In 2002, he located the wreck of John F. Kennedy’s PT-109, the craft commanded by the president in World War II.

Robert Ballard has given a great deal of information that no one had ever noticed about the oceans.

BISMARCK’S WRECK

JOHN F.KENNEDY’S WRECK

“I learned how to order my thoughts, and most important, learned how to develop a

plan. I discovered the power of a plan. If you can plan it out, and it seems logical to you, you can do it. And that was the secret to

success.”ROBERT BALLARD

THANK YOU!!!