Robert Ballard is a retired US Navy officer and professor of oceanography known for pioneering deep-sea exploration. Some of his major accomplishments include discovering hydrothermal vents and their role in geochemistry, locating historic shipwrecks like the Titanic, and making contributions to the field of archaeology. He developed new underwater technologies that enabled extensive mapping and imaging of the seafloor. Ballard's career breakthroughs enhanced scientific understanding of ocean processes and demonstrated the potential for discovery in marine exploration.

1. 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

2. 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.

3.  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
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
the Institute for Archaeological Oceanography at the University of Rhode Island.

4. 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

5.  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.

6.  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

7. “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

8. THANK YOU!!!