Word: ballards
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...ocean floor. A gaping hole where once a giant smokestack had stood. The ship's bridge, damaged by a falling boom. These and other poignant images of disaster, all in Picasso blue, were distributed in Washington last week at a news conference held by Marine Geologist Robert Ballard, leader of the expedition that early this month located and photographed the sunken liner Titanic. They were only a few of the 12,000 photos shot at the bottom of the Atlantic by the unmanned submersibles Argo and Angus after they had been lowered 13,000 ft. beneath the waves from their...
During the 90-minute conference, Ballard took his captivated audience on a kind of guided tour of the Titanic, running videotapes shot by the Argo as it was dragged by the Knorr back and forth in a series of passes over the site. The dramatic tapes clearly show the great ship sitting upright, pointing toward the north and covered with a fine layer of silt. The port and starboard anchor chains are wrapped around their capstans, still holding the anchors in place, and in the top deck there is a gaping hole that was once a skylight. Through it, Ballard...
...expedition reported shortly after the discovery that the Titanic was in "museum shape," the videotape shows that the stern is missing, and the Angus' still photos show wreckage, including a giant crane and a ship's telegraph, littering the ocean floor. Why the stern disintegrated remains a mystery. Ballard pointed out that there is no evidence on the ocean floor of any great impact, which suggests that the huge ship settled gently to the bottom. Only two of the Titanic's four mighty smokestacks remain in place; the others collapsed, perhaps when the ship's boilers exploded as they sank...
While the Argo was being maneuvered around the Titanic, Ballard revealed, it had a couple of close calls, once hitting the bridge, another time brushing against a smokestack. Despite his initial alarm, neither the Argo nor the Titanic was damaged in these encounters. But in the process, the submersible collected the only artifact so far brought up from the great liner: a smudge of paint scraped from the smokestack. Ballard also disclosed that after "mowing the lawn" with highly advanced technological gear (sweeping his sonar back and forth and checking its soundings with a magnetometer), the expedition had actually located...
With so attentive an audience, Ballard, a devoted student of Titanic lore, could not resist bringing up a controversial subject: the actions of Stanley Lord, captain of the liner Californian, who Ballard said was definitely within reach of the sinking ship and may have ignored its white distress flares. Lord claimed at investigations of the tragedy that the Californian was more than 19 miles north of the sinking ship. "The Californian was inside of ten miles, perhaps as close as four miles," Ballard insisted, "and there is no doubt it could have gone in there and rescued those people...