Thousands of feet beneath the seven seas
lies the history of the world buried in the wreckage of lost ships.
It is a realm of precious artifacts and priceless treasures.
A world of ancient mysteries long beyond our grasp.
Until today.
Now the sunken marvels of the ocean deep are up for grabs,
from ancient Roman ships to Spanish galleons
to luxury liners like the Titanic.
I dream about gold and emeralds every night.
And you gotta believe it's there and you gotta want it bad.
Some people are out to plunder the past.
While others archaeologists and scientists
like the man who first found the Titanic, are out to preserve it.
They are all armed with million-dollar high-tech tools,
and the will to spend years on the arduous search.
Just running out on a boat with a metal detector
and hoping to jump over the side and pull up a beached basket of gold coins
that's stuff of fantasy and Hollywood. That really doesn't happen very often.
It is a world where controversy reigns
where there are confusing laws and no rules.
Does anyone have a right to excavate shipwrecks?
Should the past be protected?
Or should it be picked clean for profit?
So it's a very big difference between doing something to
fill in a missing chapter in human history
and doing it for personal greed.
Explorers and archaeologists.
Entrepreneurs and salvagers.
Some will risk everything
reputation, fortune, even their lives
to possess the treasures of the deep.
The Mediterranean Sea.
On its shores grew the great civilizations of Egypt, Greece, and Rome.
And from its banks,
ancient peoples sailed beyond the safety of land in small wooden ships.
For hundreds of years, Roman ships controlled these waters,
creating a vast empire.
But the moods of the sea are harsh and unpredictable,
and a Roman vessel 100 feet long
had no defenses against storm and wave and wind.
Over the centuries, countless ships were lost
and countless sailors killed.
Now the man who discovered the Titanic
Dr. Robert Ballard, is again hunting for shipwrecks,
ancient shipwrecks in the Mediterranean.
For hundreds of years,
scientists have looked in the ocean for our history.
And for most of that time
they've only been able to look a very short distance
of one or 200 feet,
which represents an insignificant amount of the ocean.
And what we're trying to accomplish is something that's never been done before
and this is to try to excavate a ship of antiquity
that is thousands of feet beneath the sea.
To bring up ancient vessels buried a half-mile down.
It's never been done before
and Ballard only has five short weeks to do it.
You know, it's ironic that we have sent robots to Mars
and we've mapped the far side of Venus
in fact, that we know more about the moon's surface than the ocean.
To make the impossible happen
Ballard will need a floating laboratory as mission central.
The Carolyn Chouest, a U.S. Navy vessel,
will journey 80 miles west of Sicily into international waters,
where no one has a claim on lost vessels.
Ballard believes the Mediterranean is strewn with ancient wrecks
and he has long dreamed of finding one
We're sitting right now in ruins that are on the island of Sicily.
To get to Rome you have to cross the Tyrrhenian Sea;
to get to Carthage you have to cross the Straits of Sicily.
To travel from civilization to civilization here in the Mediterranean
you must cross the Mediterranean,
and many of those ships didn't make it
Many of those ships went to the bottom
and many of them went into the deep sea.
Between ancient Carthage and Rome,
it's 12,000 feet deep.
And no one has ever gone to the bottom of the Tyrrhenian Sea
to look for those ships that sank most surely sank there until now.
It was a decade ago when Ballard and a team of archaeologists
first surveyed an unexplored Mediterranean region
called Skerki Bank.
In 1988, he made a startling discovery nearly 3,000 feet down,
the remains of an ancient Roman ship lying untouched for almost 20 centuries
The find confirmed, for the first time ever,
that an ancient trade route had flourished across the open sea,
from Carthage in North Africa to Rome.
Now Ballard has returned to Skerki Bank,
where he'll attempt to excavate the ancient Roman ship.
Working in close collaboration with archaeologists,
Ballard hopes to uncover something nobody has ever seen before.
My greatest dream is that these ships are buried and well preserved,
and that their cargo in preserved and,
and who knows, maybe there's people that are preserved.
I'm not sure I want to find people,
but it would be fascinating.
We won't know until we dig them.
Could there really be the remains of ancient seafarers
at the bottom of the Mediterranean?
It is an extraordinary idea,
and to find out Ballard will use an extraordinary machine.
The NR-1. The big gun of deep-diving submarines.
It is capable of going all the way down to 3,000 feet
and staying there for a month.
Built during the clashes of the Cold war,
the NR-1 was a crucial weapon in the U.s. Navy's arsenal for 30 years,
designed to search the ocean depths for downed planes and lost missiles.
It's the best in the world, outfitted with lights, sensors, cameras,
and a mechanical arm for digging,
all of it powered by a nuclear reactor
which won't need to be refueled for 20 years.
Even now, its sonar equipment is still classified,
so sophisticated NR-1 can find a soda can sitting on the seafloor a mile away
The NR-1 is a marvel, but it's a cramped one.
The 11 -man crew shares one bolted-down kitchen table
just big enough for two people at a time.
For this mission,
Ballard has added something brand new to the sub's digging arm
a powerful suction pump that will dredge the ocean bottom.
Ballard believes the seafloor is sandy and soft,
ready to reveal whatever secrets lie hidden underneath.
What is actually down there?
Will Ballard find the timbers of an ancient Roman trading ship,
and the bones of the men who sailed it 2,000 years ago?
Sunken treasure.
It has drawn people into the seas
since the first cargo ship apart on the first shallow reefs.
Relics, gold, gems, pieces of eight
it is the stuff that countless dreams and schemes are made of.
Obsessed with the promise of riches,
undersea treasure hunters today scour the world's oceans,
crowding serious archaeologists.
The king of the undersea dreamers and schemers
is a stubborn rebel name Mel Fisher.
In his quest for treasure, Fisher let nothing stand in his way,
and came to be known as a swashbuckler a very successful swashbuckler.
In 1997, family and friends joined with fisher
to mark the spot where he struck gold nearly 25 years earlier
The reason we picked today was rather appropriate.
It's Mel Fisher's 75th birthday.
Here, here.
Long live the king. Long live the king
But the plaque and let me unveil it here take it off.
You notice we have a picture of the Atocha, and it reads:
In sincere appreciation to Mel
and Deo Fisher in their extraordinary efforts
in accomplishing mankind's most elusive goal.
They've followed their dream.
In the 1960s, Mel fisher is a man with a mad dream.
Often short of money and deep in dept,
he hunts the shallow waters off coast for treasure.
He is determined to find the shipwreck called the Atocha,
a Spanish galleon that had sunk in 1622 in a hurricane,
reportedly carrying king's ransom in sliver and gold.
Year after year, with the help of his wife and children,
Fisher combs the Florida sea.
Until 1975, when his son, Dirk,
finds the first real evidence of the ship nine bronze cannons.
Just a week later,
while returning to the site of his triumph,
Dirk Fisher's boat capsizes in the dark of night.
Dirk, his wife, and another diver die tragically.
Fisher is devastated.
But he vows to continue and to honor his son's memory.
The Atocha seems so close.
But she continues to elude Fisher, to tease him for over a decade.
Then in 1985, in 60 feet of water, he finds her, the Atocha,
the mother lode of all treasure ships.
It's worth 400 million dollars so far.
And today,
Mel Fisher is counting the riches still out there on the ocean floor.
So right over here about a quarter of a mile
is all the kings taxes for five years,
all the church collection money from all the Catholic churches
in this hemisphere for five years,
all the wealthy merchants, there was 28 of them on board
all their lifesavings for 10 or 15 years in business over here.
They were gonna go home and retire.
They didn't make it.
So there's probably another four and a half billion right over there.
Today, aging and ailing,
Mel Fisher is still bringing up treasure.
These days, it is emeralds.
His passion for treasure has been passed on
to his youngest son, ane Fisher.
Is there more come from their cursor
and they want our men for this
When wefound that... ah... we found that
court martial referee in our linds send the leve
I got one...
Here me go. That ahold a half carat
that about 3000.a carat 6000
You got to be real persistent and not give up, no matter what.
And you got to believe it's there.
And you got to want it bad.
If you want it bad enough, you'll get it.
You just got to keep looking and don't stop no matter what.
I dream about gold and emeralds every night.
And you'll never know what's five feet away from where you left off.
That's what keeps it exciting.
The Atocha puzzle still isn't solved.
I don't know when we're gonna figure it out.
And you just keep going and going.
It seems like you never get done working a shipwreck.
We've been working those wrecks for 34 years now
and still finding stuff.
It's exciting. That's what keeps you going.
Today, Mel Fisher is big business, and almost respectable.
But a swashbuckler makes enemies, big enemies.
Charging that Fisher has seriously damaged the seafloor
with his salvaging techniques,
the federal government has dragged him through the courts.
And Fisher's had to pay hundreds of thousands in fines.
But Fisher knows how to change with the times.
Conservator Sid Jones,
who worked extensively with Fisher on the Atocha,
acknowledges the need to protect history.
In the past treasure hunting,
back in the '60s or the '50s when it was really getting started,
there wasn't much thought given to recording data
or preserving the artifacts.
Of course, there was a large emphasis on finding something of value,
but we've learned in time
that every artifact that comes from these ships has value.
Once you understand the complete picture,
the items not only have a monetary value,
but they have a historical value as well,
which didn't always exist in the early phases of treasure hunting.
After finding and carefully cataloguing his treasures,
Fisher sells most of it off piece by piece.
Fisher believes that two billion more is just waiting to be recovered.
Deep in the Mediterranean,
the NR-1 is still hunting for archaeological marvels with no luck.
After three weeks of trying,
the sub and its robot arm
have been unable to make a dent in the ocean floor,
which unexpectedly turns out to be sticky and thick like clay.
Ballard's master plan is just not working.
Do the wooden hulls of the Roman vessels still exist just beyond reach?
Or has time stolen them away.
Ballard wonders if he'll ever find them.
The deep sea is always surprising me.
I every time I think I understand it,
it throws me another curve ball.
But that's okay. That's part of it.
I think it wouldn't be fun if it if I knew it that well,
and it wasn't full of surprises.
Ballard decides to change the way they use the NR-1.
He sends the sub out to do what it does best,
to act as a high-tech bloodhound,
to roam over Skerki Bank and to explore as much as possible
with its exceptional sonar senses.
Sir, request permission to rig ship for deep submerges.
Rig ship for deep submerges.
Rig ship for deep submerges, aye sir.
Rig ship for deep submerges.
Will the NR-1 discover the unknown, the unexpected?
Ballard will just have to wait and see
By working to develop new underwater technology,
Ballard has revolutionized deep sea archaeology.
At the same time,
he has inadvertently helped to blow the world of treasure hunters wide open
Now anyone with $150,000 to spare can buy an ROV,
a remotely operated search vehicle,
right off the shelf and set off for gold.
Still there are only a handful of successful deep-sea salvagers.
Seahawk Deep Ocean Technology, out of Tampa, Florida, is one of them.
Seahawk hit the jackpot in 1989
discovering a 17 th century Spanish galleon, heavy with gold and jewels,
off the Florida coast in 1,500 feet of water.
Seahawk is looking for treasure again,
this time in the seas off the coast of georgia.
Michael Reardon, Seahawk's current expedition leader,
sees himself as a treasure hunter with a difference.
That's one of our goals, is to choose shipwrecks
that are archaeologically important as well as having a commercial cargo.
So we're playing a fine line between the archaeological community
and the out-and-out smash-and-grab treasure hunters, which we're not.
Reardon is after a 19th-century paddle wheel steamer,
which they've code named The Golden Eagle,
to keep her identity hidden from other salvagers.
Now they've narrowed the search to a mere 200 square miles.
It's very difficult locating shipwrecks.
Un, with all the sophisticated equipment we have today,
it's still quite a chore.
Eep in mind right now we're 433 feet above the seafloor,
trying to put a small vehicle on a shipwreck.
There is no road sign over there.
It has taken Rearden and his colleagues years of hard work
to reach this point.
Now, using some of the same high tech tools to Ballard.
They are hoping to claim their fortune 500 feets down.
Yeah. The vehicle is on the bottem.
Roger that, I copy. The vehicle is on the bottom.
According to Seahawk, the Golden Eagle, in 1865,
found herself caught in a hurricane with nowhere to hide.
They fought the storm for two days
all hands and passengers bailing and bucketing water out.
And finally, the seas and the weather calmed down,
and it went under.
She went to the bottom,
carrying a bellyful of gold coins $400,000 at the time,
now valued at 20 million.
Six years of work coming down to a dive
with a remote vehicle and, hopefully,
when we get in on the site, it'll be the right wreck.
We have a very good sonar images of the wreck,
and dimensions are almost exact the same with target vessel
a code name Gold Eagle.
...get the target at the right.
As the ROV descends into the glittery murk of the deep sea,
project manager Brett Hobson discerns the ghostly outlines of the past.
That's the beautiful part of these old wrecks.
They're little time capsules and nobody's seen it.
And we're just sleuthing through trying looking for clues.
And it you definitely feel like a detective.
So far, everything we have seen
is a, telling us it could be the one.
Looking straight down, now, right?
Yes.
We've got the way overthere near the site, ok?
It's very quiet here and the scenes is very dark.
The light, the first one illuminated when we went down.
It's a very weird feeling.
As the ROV makes a closer pass, they see things that don't match.
Round.
Really round.
Well, we've got some very flat-sided bulwarks here.
See the big cutout going down to the keel, and the on the right?
I don't know what else it could be.
It looks just like what I had hoped we would not find.
No paddle wheels I know of has a propeller like that.
I think we're in trouble.
It's very disappointing at this moment to be sitting here
with a target that we have pinned high hopes on and now have proved that it,
it's not the right vessel.
But can't think of the right words to describe how I'm feeling right now.
It's not good.
It takes time and luck to find a pot of gold in a vast, deep ocean.
And Reardon has run out of both.
Reardon abandons the ship to the sea.
There's no profit to be made from the wreck
and unlike Ballard, treasure, not history, is what drives him.
In the Mediterranean,
the search for history does not let up
With only a few weeks left,
Ballard and the NR-1 continue to hunt Skerki for new wrecks.
Ballard also deploys Jason,
a remotely-operated search vehicle,
designed and built by engineers from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute.
Archaeologists have already spent manyhours carefully surveying
and mapping artifacts on the seafloor.
Now it's time for Jason to retrieve them.
Guided by the team,
the robot vehicle plunges 3,000 feet to locate fragile relics.
Most are roman amphoras.
They're 2,000-year-old terra-cotta containers,
the cargo holders of the ancient world,
filled with olive oil, dried fish, or wine.
Safely cradling its fragile haul, an elevator of metal and mesh
slowly traverses the half mile separating the centuries.
For the first time in 2,000 years,
human hands will hold the ancient artifacts.
Next stop for these delicate pieces of the past is the ship's laboratory,
where they'll be examined by archaeologist John Oleson,
expedition archaeological director Anna Marguerite McCann,
and conservator Dennis Piechota.
Oleson is delighted to find the simple clay pots.
Well, to find several cooking pots together,
adjacent to one another,
just as they would have been left on a kitchen bench,
is extraordinary at this depth 2,600 feet.
Treasure hunters would find little of value here.
Yet to archaeologist Jon Adams,
a shipwreck is a slice of time unexpectedly preserved.
So when a ship sinks it is,
it's a cross section of society
structure, contents, personal possessions,
contextual relationships, etcetera
lost at a single moment in time. Nobody decides what to take away,
what to leave behind when a ship sinks
It all ends up on the seabed at the same time.
And ships have been described,
rightly so in a way, as time capsules.
As they continue to explore,
Ballard and the archaeologists
are excited to see things they've never seen before.
Skerki is turning into more than they ever expected.
Could you zoom in on that?
Eep zooming.
Isn't that beautiful.
They've identified the remains of a ship,
but it's definitely not Roman origin.
Nobody knows, at first, where it's from
It's particularly interesting,
because it seems to be a relatively small ship,
and we don't see cargo, just ballast stones,
which help steady a ship when it's not carrying cargo,
or if it's a pleasure craft, such as a small personal yacht,
or possibly a type of warship.
Look at the reflection on those glasses.
Eep driving straight. Don't stop.
It's glasses.
I'm just amazed that there's glasses.
Glass. Lamps that brightened the darkness centuries before.
And despite thousands of pounds of sea pressure,
they have survived unbroken.
Obviously one of our big concerns is
that these artifacts are very, very fragile.
Jason weighs 3,000 pounds in air
and he's got a tremendous amount of momentum.
And we want to pick them up without breaking any of them.
We've never picked up glass before.
Once the objects reach the surface,
they help reveal the nature of the mysterious vessel.
It comes from the 16th century or 17 th century,
1,500 years later than the Roman ships
when Arab traders sailed these waters.
Look at this.
Could someone hold that open?
Look at that.
Isn't that amazing?
They are not gold or studded with emeralds.
Yet for Ballard, a delicate glass object is the real treasure.
They are evidence that Skerki Bank
may have been a crossroads for many countries and civilizations.
What has surprised me the most is that we thought this was one event,
that this was a fleet of ships, a group of ships
that sank together, and it's not at all.
We have ships spanning over
one thousand five hundred years of history,
if not more.
I am just amazed.
I thought that there would be a ship here and then,
way far away, another ship.
And yet, in this particular area,
20 square miles four miles by five miles we have found, now, six ships.
This area is it's sort of like a graveyard.
Ballard is no stranger to undersea graveyards.
He is the man
who discovered one of the most famous burial grounds in history.
The Titanic.
The largest, most luxurious ocean liner ever built.
Called a "Floating Palace," the Titanic sails April 10, 1912
on her maiden voyage.
She is believed to be unsinkable until her tragic rendezvous
in the North Atlantic.
Sideswiping an iceberg,
the great ship sinks in less than three hours:
1,523 people, two-thirds of all those aboard,
die in the icy waters.
For decades explorers are obsessed
with finding the final resting place of the great liner.
But no one is more intent on the hunt than Robert Ballard,
who spends 13 years looking.
Finally, in 1985,
Ballard and French explorer Jean-Louis michel
discover the remains of the ruined giant over 12,000 feet down
Ballard always treated the grand wreck as a site to be explored.
But he did it with respect.
To him it was a shrine for the dead to remain untouched, intact.
Ballard and the crew even held a memorial service
for those who died in the tragedy.
When I found the Titanic,
certainly I became emotionally attached to it.
And Jean-Louis Michel,
who was co-discover of the Titanic with me,
was equally moved. And I can remember both of us saying,
well, we'll never let this ship
be spoiled or desecrated.
Ballard discovered the Titanic, but he never claimed the laws of the sea.
Inadvertently, he was opening a Pandora's box.
Once the location of the Titanic became public knowledge,
it was a target for salvagers.
1994. Ballard's worst fears come true.
A new expedition,
led by Connecticut businessman George Tulloch,
probes the rotting remains of the Titanic.
Tulloch spends tens of millions of dollars to send down robot vehicles
and bring up jewelry, eyeglasses,
furnishings anything within reach from the devastated liner.
Once Tulloch retrieved the objects,
he legally claimed the Titanic for his own.
Ballard never thought this day would come.
I don't think in my wildest imagination did I think they would go out
and salvage it.
I mean, I was convinced they wouldn't.
And it just caught me by surprise. I was really shocked.
And there was nothing I could do about it,
because, since I didn't claim it,
I mean, it didn't even cross my mind to claim it!
Eighty-five years ago this month, the luxury ship, the Titanic, sank
on its maiden voyage across the North Atlantic.
Tomorrow, mid-Southerners
and people from across the world will be able to see the treasures
that that disaster left behind.
Like Ballard, George Tulloch expresses deep reverence for the Titanic's dead.
But he argues that people will better understand the tragedy
if they can see the artifacts firsthand.
I think Titanic is by itself capable of saying it is,
it is incomparable in terms of tragic suffering for that moment in time.
And I think the objects from that moment
deserve to stay with us.
Tulloch says his company will never sell the artifacts,
never sell off the possessions of the dead.
But his company will profit handsomely from the traveling exhibition.
I think the blessing we have is that
the court says that it's ours the company that I'm the president of.
And we don't feel that it's ours.
We feel that we're the guardian of it.
Tulloch's historian, Charles Haas,
does not want to deny ordinary people an opportunity to experience the past.
One only has to look at the museums of the world to see
that part of the archaeology process is recovering artifacts
from the ocean floor.
There are ample demonstrations of Mediterranean vessels
of all kinds of shapes having their contents brought up
and placed in museums for people to enjoy.
I think it's certainly preferable
to have the Titanic's artifacts
guaranteed to be placed before the public and teach them,
than to allow them to sit on the ocean floor where they'll be ravaged
by time and the elements down there,
and accessible, really, by only a very few people.
But to archaeologist Jon Adams,
there is no scientific reason for Tulloch's excavation of the Titanic.
We know a lot about the Titanic.
We know the names of the people on board.
We know its itinerary.
So the question the potential archaeological researcher would ask is,
if you actually go and investigate that wreck archaeologically,
in other words, pull up pieces of the material remains,
what is he going to tell you that you don't know already?
Now, this is further muddied by the fact that there are still people alive
whose relatives died on the ship.
Is there any difference between exhibiting a teacup from the Titanic
and bringing up an ancient drinking glass from the Mediterranean floor?
Tulloch doesn't think so.
One of the people that would criticize is in the Mediterranean
is sucking up the clay containers
from Roman and Greek shipping vessels.
There's something about Titanic that makes people a bit crazy,
if they feel that it's theirs.
For Ballard, there is an enormous difference
between an archaeological expedition and salvage for profit.
Every object that's recovered is recovered
because an archaeologist, an expert, says, I want that.
Sometimes they would say see that broken jar?
Pick it up.
Well, how about the unbroken one?
No, actually the broken jar has more scientific value.
Bring it up.
So we'd bring it up.
And so it's a very big difference between doing something to fill in
a missing chapter in human history and doing it for personal greed.
Nearly a decade after discovering the Titanic,
Ballard dove on another grand wreck,
the British luxury liner Lusitania.
High-tech treasure hunters had stripped as much of the broken vessel possible
looking to sell off the remains.
The salvagers even brought up three of the boat's propellers.
One propeller made it to a maritime museum.
The second was believed to be melted down
and recast as a very expensive set of golf clubs.
And the last one met an even gloomier fate.
I can remember going out and trying to find the propeller
of the Lusitania and finding it in this junkyard,
just sitting there amongst all this other junk.
And I can remember when we were diving
on the Lusitania to have that empty shaft
something was missing its propeller was missing.
And if the propeller was in a museum,
if it was serving some purpose,
I could understand that, but to find it in a junkyard,
waiting to be sold for scrap,
you have to wonder, why did you do this?
What was going through your brain?
And it had to have been just a lark.
And that's that's really sad.
Ballard's Mediterranean expedition is down to a precious handful of days.
And now the NR-1 finally pays off.
The sub uncovers two new sites,
including the oldest they've found,
containing a Roman wreck from the first century B.C.
The evidence is now inescapable.
Skerki Bank has been a major intersection
throughout Mediterranean history.
Ballard is anxious to find more.
But the seas suddenly turn dark and angry.
Well, we just found the best ancient ship we've ever discovered
and we can't get to it.
We got to get in the water. We can't get in the water.
They're telling us that we've got a storm that's coming
that's going to be sea state five.
This is our second major storm on this trip.
We lost 32 hours to the last storm.
How many hours are we going to lose to this one?
You know, I want to get down. I can't get to it.
But there is one way to get beneath the waves.
Ballard decides to send down the NR-1 during the storm.
Once under the surface,
the sub will be free of the weather, free to continue exploring.
On board is archaeologist Jon Adams,
eater to see the new find close-up.
Unlike most deep-diving subs,
the NR-1 actually has three windows on its underside.
For Adams, they are portals to the tragedies of the past.
When you're diving,
you can't get half-a-mile down, like we are now.
And it's easy to lose sight of the people.
I suppose their the last moments for them on board this vessel,
before it sank, must have been the climax of a crisis
that might have actually been going on for several hours,
as the well organized machine that the ship is gradually breaks down
and down it goes.
So it's quite an awe-inspiring sight.
In this graveyard of lost vessels,
the NR-1 explores the very last site.
The new ship is another Roman trading vessel dating
from the first century A. D.
And a cargo rarely seen by scientists.
An orderly pile of large cut stones and two pillars,
carefully wrought pieces, like giant toy blocs,
still waiting after 2,000 years, for hands to assemble them.
Perhaps they were the pre-fabricated pieces of an ancient building,
carved out of an Egyptian quarry, destined for Roman shores.
It will take months, even years,
before the archaeologists know the answers,
if they ever do.
As always,
Ballard is concerned about protecting the sites for posterity.
When we discovered the Titanic, we did not file a claim of ownership.
And I was later told that had we done that,
had we recovered one little object,
we could have claimed it, and in so doing, helped protect it.
By bringing up the Skerki artifacts,
Ballard establishes his right to claim the sites in court,
if ever it becomes necessary.
Oh, this is very heavy very heavy.
For now, Ballaard will place the artifacts recovered at Skerki Bank
in the Sea Research Foundation,
where they will be preserved
according to the highest archaeological standards.
Last one.
Together Ballard and the scientists have proven that the new world
of deep sea archaeology can work wonders.
I feel very good.
I feel that this, you know, really is an historic expedition.
This is the first major deep sea archaeological expedition,
an incredible team of people from incredibly diverse backgrounds,
working together for the first time to try to do something
that had never been done before.
I think we have shown that the deep sea is a repository of human history
on a scale we've just never comprehended before.
But are the archaeological glories of the deep sea at risk
from salvagers and treasure hunters?
Yes, Ballard believes, until they learn to respect the past.
I have no fundamental problem with treasure hunters,
if they don't destroy history in the process.
I don't think it's our right to destroy history.
It's our right to find it and document it,
but not our right to destroy it.
As long as there are marvels in the seas,
people will pursue them.
Some will be treasure hunters, dreaming of gold and gems.
And some will be scientists,
dreaming of the astonishing discovery that next awaits them.