Robert Duane Ballard was born on the 30th June 1942, in Wichita, Kansas USA, and is an underwater archaeologist, professor of oceanography and founder and director of the Institute for Archaeological Oceanography at the University of Rhode Island (URI), also serving in the US armed forces He became known mainly for locating the wrecks of the Titanic and Bismarck. Among others awards, he is the winner of American Geological Institute Award, Lindbergh Award, Hubbard Medal from the National Geographic Society.
How much is the net worth of Robert Ballard? It has been estimated by authoritative sources that the overall size of his net worth is as much as $10 million, as of the data presented in the middle of 2017, earned during his career in oceanography and archaeology which began in the mid-‘60s.
Robert Ballard Net Worth $10 Million
To begin with, Ballard is the son of Chester Patrick Ballard, who worked at North American Aviation as chief engineer of the Minuteman program, and his wife Harriet Nell. He became interested in the deep sea through books, movies and television films about the underwater world such as about “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea” and “Jacques Cousteau”. In 1965, Ballard graduated in chemistry and geology from the University of California, Santa Barbara, then from the University of Hawaii he graduated earning a Master of Science (MS) in geophysics in 1966. In 1974, he promoted a mapping work of the seabed of the Gulf of Maine in the geological oceanography department at the University of Rhode Island. Ballard belonged to the expedition team in 1977, which for the first time explored submarine hydrothermal sources, the so-called Black Smokers, near the Galapagos Islands with the research vessel Alvin. These sources have a temperature of about 400 ° C and emit a fountain of black, smoky water. A water sample yielded a pH of 2.8, which corresponds to the acidity of white wine.
Moreover, Ballard is known for locating numerous shipwrecks. On the 1st September 1985, together with Jean-Louis Michel, he found the wreck of the Titanic, which had sunk in 1912. He financed the search by first inspecting in a secret mission on behalf of the US Navy the remains of the sunken US nuclear submarines USS Scorpion and USS Thresher with a dive robot. He also discovered the German battleship Bismarck and the US American carrier USS Yorktown from the World War II. At the end of the 1980s Ballard found a Phoenician ship from the 7th century BC, one of the oldest wrecks ever found. In 1995, he dived again with the US Navy deep-diving boat NR-1 in the Mediterranean after wrecks on a trade route between Carthage and Rome. From 1999 until the end of 2000, Ballard and his team carried out a series of expeditions along the Turkish coast of the Black Sea, looking for remains of artefacts to prove the fact that the previous, inland coast of the Black Sea had already been populated by humans. In the west of Sinope, three old shipwrecks were discovered at a depth of 100 m. Wreck A and Wrck C were estimated to be from the late Roman Empire (2nd to 4th century AD), while Wreck B was attributed to the Late Byzantine Empire (5th to 7th century AD). At the end of 2000, Ballard found traces of an ancient settlement on the coastal shelf of the Black Sea.
Finally, in the personal life of Ballard, he was married to Marjorie Constance Jacobsen; they had two children before divorcing in 1990. At the beginning of 1991, he married the documentary producer Barbara Hanford Earle; they also have two children.
