Deep-sea explorer now wants to take us with him

Robert Ballard, deep-sea explorer, is having an ever-harder time outdoing himself.

He's the man who found the Titanic and the Bismarck, the carrier Yorktown, and entire fleets of ancient ships at the bottom of the Mediterranean. He helped discover the bizarre creatures that live around deep-sea hydrothermal vents, now thought of as the likely birthplace of life on the planet, and the volcanic chimneys that explain why the ocean is salty.

Now he wants to take the rest of us along with him.

Soon, Ballard promises, ordinary citizens will be able to explore the underwater wonders of the world - even deep-sea locations like the Titanic wreck - in comfort and safety. But it won't be inside submarines (the ocean explorer has been arguing against that approach for decades); rather they'll be connected to them through fiber-optic tethers.

He foresees a world where families can visit underwater sites - or anywhere else for that matter - by taking the controls of remotely operated vehicles. Seated in distant control rooms, they will see what the ROV's cameras see in screen images so large and detailed that viewers feel they are actually there.

"My end game is to use technology to make the public into explorers," he says with a smile. "Then I'm punching out."

Ballard has long been an advocate of robotic deep-sea exploration, which he says is cheaper, safer, faster, and infinitely better than actually going there in the cramped, cold, dangerous confines of manned submersibles.

"Most people have a glamorous vision of deep-sea diving that probably comes from scuba or snorkeling, where you can actually turn your head around to look at stuff," he says. But in a deep-sea sub your view is through a tiny porthole, and any adjustment takes so much work that "you're probably going to just say: 'Forget it.' "

"At least Neal Armstrong got to get out of the [lunar lander] and walk around and put his glove into the silt of the moon. But in the deep sea you absolutely can't get out." Trying to explore the deep oceans with short submarine dives is "ludicrous.... It's just not the way to do it."

Ballard has long argued that the best way to improve the effectiveness of manned submarines is to separate the crew cabin from the rest of the vehicle and leave it safe and sound on the surface. The development of fiber-optic cables made it possible to remotely operate all of a submersible's controls, cameras, and grasping claws, freeing the vehicle from the burden of providing life support and pressure shielding for its pilots.

The final straw came while piloting the sub Alvin to the newly discovered gardens of life surrounding deep-sea hydrothermal vents in the Galapagos Rift. His passenger, a top microbiologist, was seeing the vents for the first time. Ballard, who'd already seen the strange tubeworms and crabs on previous dives, was playing around with a first-generation digital camera he'd mounted on an arm of the sub.

"So we reach the bottom and I turn around and [the biologist] has his back to the window and is looking at my camera's monitor! I said, 'What are you doing?!' He says, 'I'm looking at your display. It's a better view,' " Ballard recalls. "I thought, so why are we down here?"

Subsequently, he designed the Argo/Jason system, with which he located the Titanic and the Bismarck, the Yorktown (sunk in the Battle of Midway), and many ships sunk in the naval battles for Guadalcanal Island. Argo, completed in 1983, is an "advanced scouting eyeball" equipped with high-tech visual imaging equipment and towed along the bottom by ships. When Argo finds interesting looking things, Jason, a larger robot vehicle with a mechanical arm, moves in for detailed inspections.

Ballard has since used this nested system to locate sunken fleets of Bronze Age ships in the Mediterranean and in the depths of the Black Sea. He also tried and failed to locate the Loch Ness monster and the Japanese midget subs sunk during the attack on Pearl Harbor. The latter effort is the centerpiece of his latest book, "Graveyards of the Pacific," which is largely a digested historical account of World War II in the Pacific. (Oddly, National Geographic Books included few underwater shots of wrecks, choosing instead to reprint oft-published archival pictures of the battles themselves.)

But Ballard's next project will allow the public to come along for the ride.

With support from the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, his Institute for Exploration is preparing to install ROVs in the country's marine sanctuaries, starting with the giant kelp forests of Monterrey Bay, Calif. The ROV will be attached to a wire that runs through the underwater sanctuary, like the ring road at Yellowstone National Park.

"You'll actually be able to operate the vehicle as you travel through the sanctuary," Ballard says. "And the best part is, the animals won't even know you're there."

Images from the ROV's cameras will appear instantly on wrap-around screens at the control center, a huge spherical room that Ballard says is modeled after the "globe room," the Mapparium at the Christian Science Publishing Society building in Boston. People will be able to reserve "tours" through the sanctuaries, and take their kids along.

"People aren't going to care about marine habitats unless you do something like this," he says, leaning back in his chair at the National Geographic Society, where he is an explorer in residence. "This makes it part of their lives. You need to be able to say: 'You know Fred the Grouper? Some spearfishermen came and shot him' - and have people care."

And if it can be done in the sea, why not on land? And if you can make a giant virtual-reality control room, why not put one in every home?

Ballard gestures up at a wall of framed photographs taken by National Geographic explorers in decades and centuries past. "In the future, instead of watching another baseball game on television, you'll say, 'Let's go to Yellowstone, Machu Picchu, and Tibet!' And you won't need to leave your home to do it. You'll just reserve the camera systems and go into your home dome. Speed of light - you're there!"

But for now, Ballard's at work setting up the vehicle system at Monterey Bay in California, which should be running by the end of the year. He says the ROV experience is better than going there yourself in a submarine.

"I'm already getting to where I'm being fooled into thinking I'm down there," he says. "You've got to get the technology into the background and be able to immerse yourself."

A few minutes later, Ballard hops into a taxi and speeds off to explore the electronic frontier.