My family came in 1635 from England and settled in Williamsburg. Shortly after, they split up; half went to New England and half stayed in Virginia. I'm a Virginian Ballard.

You don't let a historic site rot.

The DEEP SEA has more history in it than all the museums of the world-combined.

You can only inspire when you give people a new way of looking at the world in which they live.

Everything I'm going to present to you was not in my textbooks when I went to school ... not even in my college textbooks. I'm a geophysicist, and [in] all my Earth science books when I was a student - I had to give the wrong answer to get an A.

There's a long list of technologies that have now made it possible to carry out very precise search efforts in the deep sea.

The fact that this chain of life existed [at volcanic vents on the seafloor] in the black cold of the deep sea and was utterly independent of sunlight - previously thought to be the font of all Earth's life - has startling ramifications. If life could flourish there, nurtured by a complex chemical process based on geothermal heat, then life could exist under similar conditions on planets far removed from the nurturing light of our parent star, the Sun.