Meet Alvin

NY Science Times Blog:
Alvin NY Times

"The most important member of the expedition, however, is the 35,000-pound, egg-shaped submersible named Alvin. Alvin has been the workhorse of the deep-ocean scientific community for more than 45 years, allowing us to explore unseen worlds thousands of meters below the surface of the ocean. To sweeten the deal, Alvin comes equipped with robotic arms and an array of sample boxes, so we can collect promising samples and continue our investigations in the relative comfort of a laboratory. Faded photographs and dusty plaques commemorating the sub’s prolific history adorn the walls of Atlantis’s library. Alvin helped recover an unexploded hydrogen bomb in 1966, took Walter Cronkite to hydrothermal vents in 1982 and explored the Titanic in 1986. It hasn’t all been smooth sailing, however. In 1967, an ambitious swordfish attacked Alvin’s foam outer layer, got stuck and was eventually cooked for dinner by the crew. A couple of years later, the sub sank during deployment and spent 10 months on the seafloor before it could be resurrected."

Deep Sea Methane Vents at Hydrate Ridge
NY TIMES Science Times Methane Ridge

Jeffrey Marlow writes on the NY Times blog:

"Over the next 12 days, our contingent of 24 scientists and 30 crew members will be mounting a scientific assault on Hydrate Ridge, a fascinating site 90 kilometers off the Oregon coast where methane gas flows out of the earth’s crust and into the deep ocean. Methane has a P.R. problem: In the atmosphere, the gas is a troublemaker, contributing to climate change with 25 times the heat-trapping power of carbon dioxide. But on the seafloor, it’s a lifeline, as innovative micro-organisms are able to eke out a living converting methane to carbon dioxide and using the resulting energy to grow. Where one type of organism leads, others will follow, and entire ecosystems have grown up around these methane vents: microbes, clams, stringy tube worms and a range of other exotic species. The methane vents at Hydrate Ridge are known as cold seeps, because the temperature hovers around 4 degrees Celsius — typical of the deep ocean. These conditions are in marked contrast to the flashier hydrothermal vents, where superheated water can exceed 100 degrees Celsius and plumes of “black smoke” (which is really composed of metallic minerals) billow out of the rock chimneys."