Ballard has tracked down the ruins of several ships, including ancient wooden ones, and even found new life forms - 10-foot-long tube worms - deep below the ocean's surface.

However, Ballard considers his greatest achievement to be the educational programs he has developed to get young people excited about his work, the ocean and science in general, he told an audience Wednesday night at the Mondavi Center for the Performing Arts at UC Davis.

Ballard's talk, which included a slide show of underwater photos and graphics detailing his work, was the final installment of this year's Distinguished Speakers series.

On Sept. 1, 1985, Ballard found the RMS Titanic, the luxury oceanliner that hit an iceberg and sank in 1912. When Ballard's mother heard the news of his discovery, she told him, “that's too bad Š because now they'll only remember you for finding Titanic."

Ballard was born in Wichita, Kan., but grew up in San Diego where he developed a love of the ocean. He graduated from UC Santa Barbara and went on to the University of Hawaii and University of Southern California before serving in the Navy and earning a doctorate from the University of Rhode Island.

He began working for the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and has logged more hours in the deep sea than any marine biologist. He is also a best-selling author. And, interestingly, he's a descendant of Bat Masterson, a legendary figure from the Old West.

Trained as a marine geologist, Ballard spent his early career “looking at the natural wonders beneath the sea," including the world's largest mountain range.

“We went to the moon and even played golf there before we went to the largest feature on the planet," Ballard said. “We have better maps of Mars than Earth."

Much is still unknown about the ocean. More than 70 percent of the Earth is covered with water. The ocean's average depth is 12,000 feet, reaching to 7 miles at the deepest point in the Marianas Trench.

In 1973 and '74, Ballard explored the Rift Valley of the Mid-Ocean Ridge in a deep-diving vehicle called “Alvin," a titanium sphere with a 6-foot diameter, which held three people including Ballard, who is 6-foot-2.

The submarine, floating on the water's surface before a journey, can reach temperatures inside of 100 degrees and 90 percent humidity. After 2 1/2 hours of freefall in the ocean, the temperature drops outside, condensation forms inside, and water begins to drip from the hatch, which can be a bit disturbing for newbies.

Despite the conditions, the discoveries made it worth the trip. In the late 1970s, on an expedition off the coast of Ecuador, he made a phenomenal find: giant worms living in the ocean's hydrothermal vents. Ballard said this new life form was the big discovery of his life - not Titanic.

His explorations really began to take off with the introduction of digital cameras and fiber optics, allowing a robot submarine to be sent down into the ocean while Ballard and his crew remained on a ship at the surface.

This method was more efficient. Previously, it took six hours to dive down in a submarine and six hours to come back up. Ballard said he would spend only about three hours on the bottom at a time, covering maybe a mile of the 42,000-mile-long underwater mountain range.

A robot submersible called “Argo" helped Ballard track down the Titanic (which, by the way, was a cover for Ballard's top-secret, government-funded search for the USS Thresher and Scorpion nuclear-attack submarines). The robot sub JASON Jr., which was designed to go into the Scorpion's forward weapons chamber, explored the Titanic's interior, making the famous trek down the grand staircase.

Ballard said discovering the Titanic was like visiting Gettysburg, the historic Civil War battlefield where members of his family fought on both sides.

He recalled seeing a mother's pair of shoes next to her child's shoes, along with a mirror and combs - a reminder of the 1,500 people who died when the ship went down.

Finding the Titanic wreckage 12,000 feet below the North Atlantic was “a fascinating juncture point in my career," Ballard said, noting that it showed him the deep sea's phenomenal preservation ability.

For him, the question was “what about the ancient mariners' wooden ships?" Ballard said through history, there have been an estimated 1 million shipwrecks, particularly in the Mediterranean and Black seas, where many of the early sea-faring civilizations were established.

Ballard figured out that these ancient ships would have carried amphorae, large ceramic jugs of wine, which likely were tossed overboard when empty. So, he began searching for a ship route littered with these wine jugs - “an ancient I-95 without an adopt-a-highway program."

He found the route and he found the ships: one from 100 B.C. that carried cargo from Carthage to Rome and remnants of a ship from 750 B.C. Ballard said the older ship itself was gone, eaten by teredo mollusks, the termites of the sea. But some of its contents remained.

In 2003, Ballard established the Institute for Archaeological Oceanography at the University of Rhode Island to conduct archaeological research in the Black and Mediterranean seas.

This past summer, Ballard spent his time exploring the Black Sea, littered with Russian and German ships as well as ancient ones dating back 1,500 years. The Black Sea, originally a freshwater lake, turned to saltwater around 5500 B.C. as glaciers melted and the sea level rose. However, deep-sea oxygen generated by the north and south poles' cold water never reaches the Black Sea. Without this oxygen, ships and other items remain well preserved in its depths.

This August, he will excavate two Byzantine shipwrecks, which will be presented in streaming video online at immersionpresents.org. Ballard expects to find ships with perfectly mummified crews, who will look asleep rather than mummified in the Egyptian sense of the word.

He plans to create the first underwater museum, allowing the public to view these artifacts without having to remove them from their preserved state in the ocean.

And in partnership with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Office of Ocean Exploration, the Okeanos Explorer will begin cruising the seas in nine months, going where no one has gone before on Earth, mostly in the Southern Hemisphere. The ship's findings will be beamed to a command center. Experts will be on call rather than riding on the ship.

Ballard also plans to explore the “unknown America," the underwater land along the U.S. coast. Fifty percent of the country is under the sea, he said.

Ballard talked excitedly about the potential to share his discoveries on Internet2, which provides greater bandwidth: about 10 gigabits per second. It's available at major universities and may make it into homes within the next decade, allowing people to “travel" to amazing places - taking a ride through across the Serengeti or diving with Ballard on his explorations - without leaving their homes, Ballard said.

He believes technology is one way to get young people hooked on science. However, sometimes it takes the personal connection from someone in the field. Ballard recalled once writing a letter to the Scripps Institution, saying he wanted to become an oceanographer. A scientist answered his letter.

This is cache, read story here