Another Discovery
The Titanic is not the only famous ship that Ballard has found. In May 2002, he discovered the remains of a boat called PT-109. Pt-109 was a small naval boat, similar to the picture. Its captain was a young John F. Kennedy. Its job was to stop the Japanese navy from carrying supplies to soldiers on the Solomon Islands. On 2 August 1943 PT-109 was struck by a Japanese warship and sank. Two men died, but Kennedy and the rest of the crew managed to swim to a nearby island. The remains of PT-109 have been lying on the bottom of the sea since that day. Ballard used submersibles and naval maps to locate the boat.
Giovanni Badino is one of the world’s top ice cavers. Ice cavers spend their time inside glaciers-enormous walls of that travel very slowly down mountains. One of Giovanni’s adventures took place on the Gorner glacier in Switzerland, Europe’s highest glacier. Giovanni led a team that explored hundreds of metres down inside the glacier. They frequently had to swim through freezing pools and rivers of melting ice. Inside the glacier, the ice is always moving, so the team also faced the danger of the caves and tunnels falling in and trapping them. Because of people like Giovanni Badino, we now know much more about what goes on inside glaciers.