Ballard

In fifth grade, I had a very special opportunity to meet Robert Ballard who was my childhood hero. Best known for discovering the Titanic, Dr. Ballard also found the Bismarck and Yorktown wreck sites but his contributions have been far greater than that.

Exploring the ocean floor, Ballard has come across alien worlds that were absolutely incredible to biologists. Before his dives, it had been thought that oxygen was absolutely necessary for life to exist anywhere but then he discovered ecosystems thriving without it at all. Despite that, I remember Ballard saying we know more about outer space than we do our own planet because less than 1% of our oceans had been mapped. One year of funding for NASA, he estimated, could fund one hundred years of maritime exploration.

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