Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Robert Ballard

American Professor of Oceanography, Underwater Archaeologist, Geologist, U.S. Navy Officer and Historian

"Almost a quarter of our planet is a single mountain range and we didn't enter it until after Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin went to the moon. So we went to the moon, played golf up there, before we went to the largest feature on our own planet."

"Don't confuse facts with reality."

"Follow your own passion - not your parents', not your teachers' - yours."

"Fifty percent of our country that we own, have all legal jurisdiction, have all rights to do whatever we want, lies beneath the sea and we have better maps of Mars than that 50 percent."

"Forever may it remain that way. And may God bless these now-found souls."

"I am a geologist."

"I am an underwater explorer, not a treasure hunter."

"I am really dedicated to understanding the planet/creature on which we live and know that means I must go beneath the sea to see 72 percent of what is going on."

"I believe in just enriching the economy. And we're leaving so much on the table, 72 percent of the planet."

"I mean, there is amazing amount of oil and gas and other resources out beneath the sea. It's staggering."

"I mean, technology is amoral. It has no morality."

"I think the most important thing people can do to save our planet and the human race is to empower women!"

"If the thunderstorm parks itself above the summits, there's a good chance for snow."

"I love all of the Earth."

"I would have to say my favorite place on Earth is Bora Bora."

"If you compare NASA's annual budget to explore the heavens, that one year budget would fund NOAA's budget to explore the oceans for 1,600 years."

"If you plan it out, and it seems logical to you, then you can do it. I discovered the power of a plan."

"I'm a geophysicist and all my earth science books when I was a student, I had to give the wrong answer to get an A. We used to ridicule continental drift. It was something we laughed at. We learned of Marshall Kay's geosynclinal cycle, which is a bunch of crap."

"It's not a huge surprise that there are habitations at the bottom of the Black Sea."

"It is a quiet and peaceful place - and a fitting place for the remains of this greatest of sea tragedies to rest."

"Most of the southern hemisphere is unexplored. We had more exploration ships down there during Captain Cook's time than now. It's amazing."

"It is easier to believe a lie that one has heard a thousand times than to believe a fact that no one has heard before."

"No scientist will sit on (a ship) for that long, reading a book and eating popcorn for the whole time, no way."

"NASA?s annual budget for space exploration could fund NOAA?s budget for ocean exploration for 1600 years."

"My family came in 1635 from England and settled in Williamsburg. Shortly after, they split up; half went to New England and half stayed in Virginia. I'm a Virginian Ballard."

"Our chances for rain are diminishing and it looks like that will hold. We're sort of at the tail end, not out of the woods yet. But overall we're doing pretty good."

"So, I'm able to network experts on demand, when I need them."

"So, you know, I think the age of exploration is just beginning, not ending, on our planet."

"The body is sort of a pain. It has to go to the bathroom. It has to be comfortable. But the spirit is indestructible. It can move at the speed of light."

"The deep sea is the largest museum on earth, it contains more history than all the museums on land combined, and yet we?re only now penetrating it."

"The threat from flash flooding is diminishing rapidly. We're not completely out of the woods, but we're on the right path."

"There's a long list of technologies that have now made it possible to carry out very precise search efforts in the deep sea."

"The fact that this chain of life existed [at volcanic vents on the seafloor] in the black cold of the deep sea and was utterly independent of sunlight?previously thought to be the font of all Earth's life?has startling ramifications. If life could flourish there, nurtured by a complex chemical process based on geothermal heat, then life could exist under similar conditions on planets far removed from the nurturing light of our parent star, the Sun."

"The Titanic will protect itself."

"They found a fragment, big deal. Am I surprised? No. When you go down there, there's stuff all over the place. It hit an iceberg and it sank. Get over it."

"This is an unusual and dangerous situation. We really want to stress that to people. It's not going to take much to bring a wall of water sweeping down one of those mountains."

"There are more active volcanoes beneath the sea than on land by two orders of magnitude."

"Well, when I was a kid, I grew up in San Diego next to the ocean. The ocean was my friend - my best friend."

"There's probably more history now preserved underwater than in all the museums of the world combined. And there's no law governing that history. It's finders keepers."

"What drives me is exploration with a purpose, more the classic Royal Geographical Society genre."

"You don't go to Gettysburg with a shovel; you don't take belt buckles off the Arizona."

"Where I live in Connecticut was ice a mile above my house, all the way back to the North Pole, about 15 million kilometers, that's a big ice cube. But then it started to melt. We're talking about the floods of our living history."

"You don't let a historic site rot."