Navy Research Sub Rolls on Wheels In Gulf of Mexico

March 1, 2007, 5:11PM
Sub to seek 'secrets of the Gulf' off Galveston


By HARVEY RICE
Copyright 2007 Houston Chronicle

GALVESTON ?- A U.S. Navy submarine that can roll on wheels across the ocean floor will leave port here Friday on an expedition to search the deep for evidence of ancient human habitation.

The Navy's only nuclear-power research vessel, the NR-1, will carry scientists looking for signs that early humans may have lived on a coast that 19,000 years ago extended 100 miles farther into the Gulf of Mexico than it does today.

If scientists on the expedition, dubbed "secrets of the Gulf," find evidence that humans roamed those ancient shores, it would push back the earliest known date of prehistoric human habitation in North America by about 8,000-10,000 years, said Dwight Coleman, the expedition's chief scientist.

Robert Ballard, the scientist who discovered the wreckage of the Titanic and the German battleship Bismarck, will direct the search from a telecommunications center lined with 50-inch plasma monitors at the Institute for Exploration at the Mystic Aquarium in Connecticut.

Ballard, along with scientists at five other locations, will monitor instruments giving temperature, depth, water salinity and other data along with images from the submarine broadcast via satellite in real time and be able to give directions to the two scientists on board.

Ballard will have 16 communications lines allowing him to speak directly with scientists on board the submarine and its support ship, the 238-foot Carolyn Chouest, crammed with scientific equipment and hi-tech communications gear.

Live Web casts from the expedition hosted by Ballard will be broadcast by Immersion Presents on March 4-9 at 11 a.m., noon, 2 p.m., 3 p.m. and 4 p.m. at www.OceansLIVE.org and www.immersionpresents.org.

The 24 scientists on board the vessels will be using sonar to map an ancient coast line that would have roughly followed the present coral reefs that make up the Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary, under the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration.

"Nobody's ever found anything from 20,000 years ago offshore, but that's because nobody has ever looked," said anthropologist David Robinson, a member of the expedition from the University of Connecticut.

Robinson said that even if the expedition failed to find evidence of human habitation, it would lay the groundwork for doing so by determining the location of the ancient coast the prehistoric beds of Texas rivers like the Sabine and Trinity.

Ballard said the best place for human settlement is where a river meets the sea, places covered by the sea after the last ice age and until now in waters too deep to explore.

The Flower Garden Banks are coral reefs lush with wildlife on top of salt domes that have pushed up from the sea beds. The salt would have been above water and sought by humans and animals alike, making it a prime location for hunting, Ballard said.

The expedition cost of about $300,000 is shared by NOAA, the National Marine Sanctuary Foundation, the Institute for Exploration, Immersion Presents and the University of Rhode Island, Ballard said. The U.S. Navy is using the expedition as a training mission, NR-1 Cpt. Enrique Panlilio said.