Few people know, but the dicoverer of the wrecks of the famous transatlantic Titanic was the oceanographer Robert Ballard, who was born in June 30^th, 1945, in Kansas, but moved and grew up in San Diego, California. 

In 1962, with his father's help, Ballard started a half-time work on the Ocean Systems Group. The job made him create a interest about the oceanology. During the Vietnam War, Robert went to the US Navy, as a oceanographer. The Navy assigned Ballard to Woods Hole Oceanographic Research Institute, in Massachusetts. In 1974, He earned a Ph.D. in geology and geophysics and started to work at Woods Hole as a full-time marine scientist.

  

In one of his expeditions, using a deep-water submarine, he dicovered plants that product energy by chemical reactions, instead of most of the plants, that feed themselves by the fotosyntesis. It created another discursion about the possibility of life out of the Earth. Ballard was, too, the first man that saw a submarine volcano. he named it "Black Smokers".

 

In 1985, in other expedition, Ballard noted some anomalies in the ocean floor. There were small craters originated by a impact. When he was investigating the area, he found the Titanic wrecks. At first, he didn't want to declarate the location of the shipwrecks because he didn't want someone claiming the "dead parents" property, so he declarated the site as a cemitery.

A year after, Robert returned to the wrecks, this time with an ALVIN, a remote controled submarine that can take 16 thousand photos.

  

Today, Robert Ballard is the president of the Institute for exploration, in Mystic, Connectcutt, scientist emeritus of Woods Hole Oceanographic Instituition, and director of the Institute for Archaeological Oceanography at the University of Rhode Island.