Robert Ballard Quotes (10 Quotes)

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.