Dr. Robert Ballard, president of the Sea Research Foundation at the Mystic Aquarium Institute for Exploration, announces details about his next expedition at the Nautilus Live Theater at the Mystic Aquarium Institute of Exploration, in Mystic, Conn., Thursday, July 28, 2011. Ballard, best known for discovering the Titanic wreck, has new plans to plumb the depths of the seas. Ballard said Thursday that his latest deep-sea venture will send crews combing through the Black, Aegean and Mediterranean seas for artifacts from ship wrecks and ancient civilizations. (AP Photo/The Day, Tim Martin) |
MYSTIC,
Conn. (AP) — Oceanographer Robert Ballard, best known for discovering
the Titanic wreck, has new plans to plumb the depths of the seas.
Ballard
said Thursday that his latest deep-sea venture will send crews combing
through the Black, Aegean and Mediterranean seas for artifacts from ship
wrecks and ancient civilizations.
His
research vessel, the E/V Nautilus, set out from a port in Turkey last
week on a four-month mission that will use four remote-operated vehicles
and sonar technology to explore lost cities, as well as hydrothermal
vents and undersea volcanoes.
At
a news conference at Mystic Aquarium in Connecticut, Ballard said that
while he has a general idea of what his crew might find, the exploration
is about looking for the unknown.
“We’re
fascinated by extremely confusing parts of our planet and we say ‘let’s
go there and see if we can figure it out,” said Ballard, a co-leader of
the mission who is planning to join the ship later.
The
211-foot ship, carrying a team of about 15 scientists, will travel
through waters including the Hellenic and Aeolian Arcs, the Gorringe
bank and the Straits of Sicily — a course that will take it near deep
trenches, continental faults and cities under the surface of the
Mediterranean that are more than 2,000 years old. The journey is
expected to wrap up in November off the coast of Israel.
Ballard,
who is also a professor at the University of Rhode Island, founded the
Institute for Exploration at the Sea Research Foundation, the nonprofit
environmental organization that also runs Mystic Aquarium. In addition
to leading an international team that discovered the RMS Titanic in 1985
on the floor of the North Atlantic, Ballard found the wrecks of the
battleship Bismarck and the PT-109 torpedo patrol boat that John F.
Kennedy commanded during World War II.
The
69-year-old explorer said his ship will dispatch video and audio feeds
from this newest venture to connect with the public as he pursues new
discoveries. The material will be available online and at a theater at
Mystic Aquarium, and teams of educators will rotate aboard the ship to
host information sessions and explain the latest finds.
Mission
co-leader Katherine Croff Bell said the live technology lets the ship
expand beyond the knowledge of the scientists onboard.
“If
we don’t have the proper expertise on the ship we can call somebody on
shore and have them be a part of the exploration in real time,” Bell
said.
Paul
Johnson, an oceanographer at the University of Washington who has
worked with Ballard, said these types of expeditions help stir public
interest in deep-sea research. He said the voyage was not a traditional
research mission and would likely involve a mixture of education,
entertainment and “probably some science mixed in there.”
The
ship’s primary mission is to make discoveries, not try to extract
artifacts or disturb the seabed. For Ballard and the E/V Nautilus, that
means setting themselves up for to find something new by planning trips
over unusual or unknown areas.
“What really excites me is when you go looking for one thing and find something more important,” Ballard said.
“So we are all about creating moments of discovery by trying to get a little lucky,” he said.
SOURCE: The Associated Press
