Titanic Discoverer Launches Israel Sea-Floor Expedition
What is the man who discovered the wreck of the Titanic hoping to discover in the waters off the coast of Israel?
As well as boasting the discovery of the Titanic wreck in 1985, Robert Ballard, a former US Navy commander and today a professor of oceanography at the University of Rhode Island, also found the wreck of the battleship Bismarck in 1989 and the wreck of the aircraft carrier USS Yorktown.
Yesterday, his research ship, the Nautilus, set sail from Haifa. Nautilus is a research ship fully equipped with state-of-the-art technologies for sea-floor research, and includes diving robots, elaborate control rooms and more. Ballard is on board… but via videoconference, choosing to control goings-on on the ship from the US. Present on board to manage proceedings together with cyber-captain Ballard is Zvi Ben-Avraham, the Israel Prize winning director of Haifa University’s Leon H. Charney School of Marine Sciences.
The aim of the two-week expedition is to examine the sea floor of Israel’s coast. As for what they hope to find, Ben-Avraham said that “[t]he future is in the sea and this voyage is a first step towards understanding the mystery of a region that is so close to us yet still so far and unknown.”
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.
At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.
Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
