I would say the discovery of the hydrothermal vents off the Galápagos Islands. That really turned science upside down. Until that time, there were a lot of things we didn’t know about the ocean. We didn’t know why it was salty. We didn’t know why it had the chemistry that it had.
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RB
Robert Ballard
Marine geologist and oceanographer; discoverer of the wreck of the Titanic
United States · b. 1942
Science and medicine
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Oceanographer at Woods Hole who led the discovery of hydrothermal vents on the Galápagos Rift in 1977 and located the wreck of the Titanic in 1985.
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