60 Minute Video: The Great Explorer (Bob Ballard) on discovery of Titanic, and thinking outside of the box
GREAT EXCERPT (Captures triangulation between Sonar, Remote Camera, and Thinking Outside of Box):
Asked how he got around that (i.e., past failed efforts to locate the Titanic), Ballard told Logan, "By cheating. I basically didn't do the search pattern the way they had done it. See the traditional approach to searching for something in darkness, cause you can't see, is use a sonar. And you lower the sonar down, and you tow it back and forth, and you mow the lawn. And that's what all three of them had done. And I went, 'Well, clearly that's not working.'"
So Ballard used what he had just learned investigating the Navy subs: that when a vessel sinks, the wreckage is carried by the current, leaving a trail of debris like a comet. Applying that to the Titanic, he decided not to look for the ship itself.
Instead he searched for the trail of debris that he estimated stretched over a mile, a much bigger target. And instead of using the sonar to slowly comb every inch of the sea floor as the others had done, he used cameras on a remote controlled vehicle to hunt visually, spacing his search lines almost a mile apart.
"So I was able to go through the box real quick. And sure enough, I picked up the trail, and as soon as I picked up the trail I knew exactly: go north. And I walked right into the Titanic," he explained.
Asked how the other experts could not worked that out before him, Ballard said, "They were in the box. They were in the, this is the way you do it. …I live outside the box. I'm always outside the box."
HAUNTED HOUSE: Remembering the moment of discovery, Ballard said, "Our initial reaction was joy. And we're jumping up and down. And then someone looked, in our control room we had a clock. And someone looked. And it was 2 in the morning. And someone says, 'You know, she sinks in 20 minutes.' 'Cause she sank at 2:20 in the morning. And all we were embarrassed we were celebrating. And all of a sudden we realized that we should not be dancing on someone's grave."
The Titanic was the largest manmade moving object on Earth at the time of its sinking, but it was the smallest personal objects scattered across the floor of the North Atlantic that impacted Ballard the most.
Also, in second part of video is incredible discoveries that debunk assumptions of varied forms and environments that life can flourish within (earth powered life v. sun powered; underwater rivers)
