Soldier's Girl

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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 archeologists

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 archeologists,

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

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