By Adam Goodheart
On a drizzly morning in Mystic, Conn., the town's famous aquarium is crowded with tourists. The dim central exhibit hall features strange juxtapositions of our terrestrial world with the animals' subaqueous one: A toddler howls at the sight of a bottle-nosed dolphin behind its glass wall, while in front of another tank, a little girl stands silhouetted against bright water as a four-foot shark glides silently past her.
Outside, behind a barrier that keeps tourists at bay, workers are driving rivets into the superstructure of a new building, a stylishly lopsided steel cylinder with a moat in front of it. This new building is called, somewhat grandly, the Institute for Exploration. When it is finished, in a few months' time, it will house the world's first institution devoted to the archaeological study of the deep ocean. Visitors will enter the building and cross a concrete pier designed to look like the stern of a research vessel, with an ROV sitting poised for launch at its fantail-
a kind of monument to the celebrated exploits of the institute's founder, Robert Ballard.
For the time being, however, Ballard is ensconced in rather more modest temporary quarters across the road from the Mystic Aquarium, next to a liquor store in a shopping center. Despite his unnautical surroundings, the man who greets me looks more like he belongs on the bridge of a boat than behind a desk: He is tall and suntanned, dressed in a white polo shirt and a navy-blue baseball cap. On the walls are an artist's renderings of Ballard's best-known discoveries: the bow of the Titanic looming out of the darkness of the deep Atlantic, the Nazi battleship Bismarck with a faded swastika on its foredeck.
Ballard is not, in fact, an archaeologist by training. Although the public knows him for his shipwreck discoveries, he won professional recognition as an oceanographer, during the years of intensive undersea exploration that followed the 1963 sinking of the Thresher. He mapped the midoceanic ridges, found new species of sea life and bizarre geological formations. But in recent years, he has become convinced that the most important discoveries left to be made in the deep ocean are archaeological ones; he has said that he thinks the depths of the ocean may hold more history than all the museums in the world combined. In 1997, Ballard left his long-time position at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute in Massachusetts for the Mystic Aquarium, which had pledged millions of dollars in state funding to support his work.
"The goal of our institute is to create a new field of science," Ballard says. "We're not talking about finding a ship like the Titanic and then it's done. The potential is there for centuries of work. It's just vast-endless."
More than anyone else, Ballard has seen firsthand how vast that potential is. During the summer of 1997, he spent several weeks combing the Mediterranean floor off Sicily for ancient shipwrecks. In waters as deep as 900 meters, the expedition found the remains of five Roman vessels, wrecked between about 100 B.C.
and A.D. 400. The ships' wooden superstructures had long since vanished, but their cargoes lay spread out across the sea floor, almost perfectly undisturbed.
That expedition was meant mostly as a test to show what the latest technology-including an advanced ROV, high-resolution sonar equipment, and a U.S. Navy manned research submarine-could accomplish. Next summer, Ballard will begin the project that he thinks may be the most important of his career: an exploration of the depths of the Black Sea.
"The Black Sea should be a preserving environment unlike any other environment on the planet, because it's anoxic," Ballard explains. "That means there's no oxygen once you get below the first 10 percent of its depth, which means no marine organisms. Anything that fell into it should be in an extraordinary state of preservation. There might be an entire Greek galley down there with its sails up and guys draped over the oars. Do I expect that? No. But we just don't know. No one has ever explored it before."
Still, Ballard is all too aware that the deep ocean does not belong to him alone. The night before our meeting, the Discovery Channel aired its live broadcast of the Titanic hull-plate recovery, and he is still smarting a bit from his irritation at the spectacle. Ever since the impresario behind that program-George Tulloch, a former Connecticut car dealer turned commercial salvor-began hauling up artifacts from the wreck in 1987, Ballard has decried what he sees as the desecration of his discovery, a desecration that occurred because there was no law to stop it. He has therefore often been identified as one of the principal foes of underwater treasure hunting. But when I ask him what he thinks of the proposed UNESCO treaty, and of the efforts to ban commercial salvage outright, his response comes as a bit of a surprise.
"I see both sides of this," he says. "I would imagine that if these laws were in effect, we wouldn't have made the discoveries we've made. For example, we were working last summer in the Mediterranean, in a zone that's a contested economic zone between Italy and Tunisia. So what does that mean? Do you have to get permission from both? Do you have to simply not do anything in contested waters? It's a matter of killing off the incentive."
In any case, Ballard says, only a very few shipwrecks would repay the expense of a for-profit salvage mission in deep water. And he draws a distinction between wrecks that are so badly decayed, or deeply buried, that they must be excavated to reveal information and those that should be left untouched on the bottom, as monuments of a sort. Ballard includes most deep-water wrecks in the latter category, not least of all the Titanic. "We're talking about what is the best way to let people encounter that story, that piece of history," he says. "The way the Titanic is laid out is very much like a battlefield, like a disaster site. It's like going to the battlefield at Gettysburg the day after the battle. The deep sea has the ability to preserve the event, and I think-when I went down there and found shoes sitting on the bottom of the ocean like this"-suddenly he pulls off his battered brown loafers and sets them carefully on the floor between us, positioned as though they were on a pair of vanished feet-"that's powerful. And I happen to think that coming upon that is a more compelling experience for people than seeing the same things in some museum in Connecticut."
Ballard's expedition to the Mediterranean retrieved only a few dozen artifacts from the various vessels it explored-just enough, he says, to identify and date each wreck. And he plans to continue this policy indefinitely. To explain why, he pulls out a sheaf of black-and-white photographs, each one a detailed mosaic depicting an oblong swath of sea floor. One of them shows two groups of Roman amphorae nearly all unbroken, sitting on the sand: contents of the fore and aft holds of an ancient cargo vessel. Another site includes neatly arranged stone blocks and columns, perhaps part of a prefabricated temple that was being shipped across the sea.
"We can map the entire top layer of a site like this in four hours," Ballard says. "You can just superimpose this photo over one of these"-he picks up a brightly colored sonar image, in which each amphora appears as a contoured hummock-"and get precise measurements. That's it. My argument is: Find them. Document them. Leave them there.
"When explorers found the first royal tombs in Egypt, their instinct was to box everything up and ship it to London because no one would ever come there to see it," he says. "I'd like to have been there to tell them: 'Have you ever heard of Cairo International Airport? Ever heard of a 747? Ever heard of Hyatt on the Nile? Ever heard of Hertz Rent A Car? Ever heard of a Nikon camera? No? But it's all going to happen. Everyone's going to get in a 747, they're going to fly to Cairo, they're going to go to the hotel, they're going to rent a car, they're going to bring a camera, they're going to get to the tomb-and everything will be gone.' They'd say, 'You're crazy.'
"Well, it's the same with a shipwreck. If they can do that stunt last night live from the Titanic, if Jim Cameron can use it as a prop in a movie-well, it doesn't take a Nobel laureate to know that when fiber optics hits your house, you will travel to that site electronically. There'll be a way to show it so you're convinced you're there. People will get to the Titanic and ask, 'Why has that crow's-nest been destroyed?' 'Well, some salvors went after the bell. They destroyed the crow's-nest to get it.' 'I don't want the bell, I want to see the crow's-nest! I want to see where the guys were standing when they saw the iceberg.' Gone!"
On that last, plaintive word, Ballard pauses dramatically, leans forward in his chair, and his eyes lock into mine, unwavering: "What is the greatest experience of all? Discovering something yourself for the first time. Ever been to the Ming tombs in China? They've done nothing to them. It's like they were just opened up. That beats the dickens out of getting to an Egyptian tomb and finding nothing but graffiti. I'm talking about finding the pyramids of the deep and leaving them exactly as they are. And what I imagine when I think of great lost ships isn't the ones we read about and then decide to go after-it's the ones we don't even know exist yet. What about those Roman ships off of Brazil? That's real discovery. I mean, the Titanic, in the final analysis, is no big deal."