Explorations

About this book

Dr. Robert Ballard is the world's most renowned and accomplished oceanographer - a scientist and adventurer whose feats of exploration and discovery have enraptured the world. Now, for the first time, Dr. Ballard tells the entire story of his fascinating undersea career - a career marked with scientific breakthroughs, awe-inspiring revelations, and personal triumphs and tragedies. We journey with him on treacherous bathyscaphes and tiny deep submersible vehicles as he uncovers the magnificent beauty and awesome wonders of the natural deep - from his team's momentous discovery of the giant clams, worms, and other exotic life forms thriving at depths previously believed unlivable, to his undersea geological proof of the theory of plate tectonics, and his discovery of the super-hot hydrothermal vents that may well be the source point of all life on Earth. But we also travel with him as he uncovers the secrets of mankind that have been hidden by the crushing depths and pure darkness that exist on the ocean's floors. We share the triumph and the wonder of the discovery of the remains of the Titanic - the majesty of inching down the "unsinkable" liner's grand staircase and the heartbreak of finding the porcelain head of a child's doll - all at twelve thousand feet below the sea. We learn the secrets that the great Nazi warship Bismarck carried with her to her undersea grave. And for the first time ever, Dr. Ballard tells us of previously classified expeditions to uncover the wrecks of Cold War nuclear submarines, to try to ascertain why they were lost, and what dangers they still carry.