Alvin: Pioneer of the Deep | Changing Seas

[Music] dsv alvin also known as deep submergence vehicle 2 is a deep sea submersible owned by the united states navy and operated by the woods hole oceanographic institution [Music] carrying two passengers and a pilot on each dive the sub has taken thousands of explorers to depths once thought unreachable every time i get to dive in alvin i see something i've never seen before i get to experience that environment firsthand and it's often led to big discoveries not only for my research but other people as well for more than 50 years the sub has traveled to extraordinary places capturing the world's imagination and heartbreak in 1986 it dove on the titanic deploying the remotely operated vehicle jason jr and returning with striking imagery of the site and following the deepwater horizon disaster in 2010 alvin aided scientists investigating the impacts of the oil spill on deep sea corals [Music] what sets alvin apart is its productivity it's incredibly well supported by the community of researchers that use the vehicle and the national science foundation and the office of naval research of its thousands of dives since 1964 there is one often held as the most significant the discovery of hydrothermal vents near the galapagos islands these alien-like deep-sea communities where life thrives without the light of the sun were unknown to humankind before alvin visited them the discovery events changed the way we think about life and alvin was really the workhorse that did all that work in 1977. if you look at it on a map it just looks like a big blue expanse but down on the bottom it's a different planet now alvin is poised to continue its revolutionary scientific work with a new set of upgrades and deeper depth rating the possibilities are endless alvin will be able to map things that we've never seen before that otherwise have not been accessible to human discovery how has the research conducted with the alvin submersible impacted our understanding of the oceans and what can alvin's incredible history of discovery inspiration and daring tell us about life on earth and beyond [Music] major funding for this program was provided by the bachelor foundation encouraging people to preserve and protect america's underwater resources additional funding was provided in loving memory of david g perrault by the perot family endowment for environmental education [Music] at the national deep submergence facility at the woods hole oceanographic institution or hui for short a team of engineers is working on improvements to the human occupied vehicle alvin this upgrade will take alvin's cruise deeper and farther than ever before alvin undergoes a complete overhaul every five years or so the sub is completely taken apart everything is serviced and then it's put back together this 8 million upgrade will expand the submersible's depth rating from 4 500 meters down to 6 500 meters roughly four miles below the ocean surface soon scientists will be able to reach nearly 98 of the ocean in alvin the current update to alvin that's happening right now is is going to be fantastic for us we're having new high-powered thrusters we're having new motor controllers all the things that help us be more agile on the seafloor things that allow us to get down to deeper depths quicker the control systems on the vehicle are going to be fantastic the new upgrade of cameras and lights alvin has been the workhorse and it's always evolved with the science that we want to do there's virtually no part of alvin today that is original to alvin the alvin submersible has been updated so many times since 1964. it has been likened to the ship of theseus a thought puzzle over which philosophers such as plato plutarch and luck have deliberated is a ship still the same vessel if it has been entirely replaced over time piece by piece it's a story of a ship that perpetually exists but all the bits and pieces have been replaced over time we always get this question what's the oldest part of the submarine and it has evolved over the years right alvin is not the alvin that it was in the 60s by any stretch and it's not the same sub that was in the 80s when we come out of this overhaul it's likely to be no later than about 2012. so it's same same but different right the technology that's been brought on board to sub has enabled it to last easily another 50 years so it's a platform that i really hope sticks around and enables things that we can't even think of right now more than 3 000 people have explored the ocean floor in alvin on over 5 000 dives around the world i have used alvin for a number of my deep sea studies working in the atlantic and the gulf of mexico and the pacific ocean i've had really incredible success using alvin to conduct very complicated science and extreme deep-sea environments and we use alvin to explore but also do really systematic ecosystem-based science in these different places researchers from disciplines across the sciences have used alvin to study the ocean's depths from biologists and chemists to geologists and volcanologists like patricia gregg who studies volcanoes on earth and other planets over the past few years we've been looking at a series of volcanoes and the equatorial pacific and one of the things that we were very interested in with this chain of seamounts was whether or not they could be potential oasis for marine life moving up and down mid-ocean ridge axes so is this something that could allow biology to make its way along the sea floor so understanding these volcanoes and their eruption history could give us a lot of information for how life is evolved and moved in our water columns tomorrow morning it starts my first album dive very excited a little nervous just a little nervous okay a lot nervous [Music] one of the things that i did on my first dives was i videoed myself just waiting to go diving in alvin for the first time is often a transformative experience especially for early career scientists sometimes changing the course of their studies dive 2683 december 13th uh 1993 you never forget your first dive i was blown away and this is what i was going to do for the rest of my life i was so excited about diving in alvin for the first time so i i think i woke up not really having slept and being incredibly thrilled to have the opportunity to go inside [Music] when you're going down to conserve energy the pilots turn off the lights so it's completely black except for a few blinking lights and then just before you get to the bottom that pilot flips on the lights everything was completely still so it looked as though you could just open the hatch get out and walk around outside of course you can't do that because the pressure at that depth is around two tons per square inch so it just blew my mind you know the bottom of the ocean if you go down more than 1000 feet or so it's about like a refrigerator so it's chilly you're looking at hydrothermal vents so like you know literally a few feet in front of your face is something that's venting 400 degrees celsius which is like you know 750 degrees fahrenheit and it's just amazing and mesmerizing time just flies by it goes so fast there's all of this work and anticipation and effort and logistical challenges to just get the vehicle in the water and then once you're there you're on a clock you're going down and actually representing the science of all the people that are involved in the research not just your own work so you're expected to do a lot of different tasks in a minimum amount of time alvin goes in the water at 8 00 a.m and it comes up about 5 p.m so it's a full day in the water i think the most surreal aspect of it is eating lunch and you're just sitting there eating food and like you know you kind of take a break for a minute so you can it can all sink in while you're eating and you're like there's like 2 500 meters of water on top of me and that's ridiculous i feel like i spend the whole dive either with my face like up against the window just staring out the window in amazement or like vigorously taking notes because you don't want to miss anything i get to see this experience on a regular basis when i take people in there they're transformed their their ability to understand the planet has been altered and it all goes back to the machine and the vision of the people who created it right this is alvin it opens a new frontier of research now man can explore the ocean to the very outer edge of the continental shelf and beyond if you could go back to those original days and let them know you will be creating something magnificent it'll have such a huge impact on people's lives much less the greater scientific community maybe a few people had a vision of that but the scope of what they created is pretty magnificent and it's lasted [Music] not long after swiss scientist auguste picard launched the first deep submergence vehicle in 1953 the bathuscaf trieste woods hole scientist alan vine proposed the united states develop its own [Music] i had been one of those people who felt the submersible had a future it seemed logical that rather than building another general-purpose research ship it would make more sense to build some special purpose ships that could go down to the bottom and look with the eyeball so we could look over a terrain that was otherwise not accessible and in actuality the geologist has long been associated with a burrow or the mule and uh we wanted some kind of a of a mule that would dive by 1962 hui had partnered with the office of naval research and the aeronautical research division at general mills to build the world's second deep submergence vehicle the new submersible capable of diving to six thousand feet was originally nicknamed sea pup but the newly formed hui deep submergence group instead began calling it alvin after alan vine who had championed its creation they probably didn't realize at the time that in calling it alvin they gave it life you ask me it's a living thing it has a personality there's no doubt in my mind so certainly people think of alvin as a machine but they really do think of it i think we all do as having an existence that's beyond just this thing that's parked there on deck alvin was commissioned on june 5th 1964 and its first pilot took it on a test dive in woods hole harbor three weeks later the team then completed 77 tethered dives to maximum depths of 70 feet and by august 4th they took alvin on its first free non-tethered dive to 35 feet a year later a craftsman from cape cod took two old navy pontoons and made a tender for it alvin had to have a ship and that mother ship was named lulu and that was after alvin's mother who was named lulu in march of 1965 lulu and alvin set sail on their first voyage to andros island in the bahamas lulu alvin passing five eight double-o feet approaching the bottom i will call you back the next year the u.s navy called upon alvin to find and recover a hydrogen bomb off the coast of spain that fell into the mediterranean sea following a mid-air collision alvin located the missing munition near palomares in 2500 feet of water it wasn't until the early 1970s just a few years after astronauts landed on the moon that alvin was used for science as alvin was being born so was plate tectonic theory and that theory is that oceanic plates pull apart interior heated magma comes up and spews out onto the seafloor it freezes quickly onto the sea floor when it does that it contracts it cracks that enables an egress for hydrothermal vent water to come through and so the idea that scientists had including bob ballard and others was that there should be heat coming out of the earth's crust french and american geologists including dr robert ballard began developing a multi-submersible expedition to explore the mid-atlantic ridge this french-american mid-ocean undersea study or project famous would lay the groundwork for what would become one of alvin's greatest discoveries [Music] to prepare for the mission engineers replaced alvin's steel personnel sphere with a titanium one extending alvin's depth range from thousand to twelve thousand feet at that stage we didn't know what these mid-ocean ridges really were we knew that the continents drifted apart we knew there was this mountain range in the middle but what happened there we didn't really know until we were able to get down there and validate the hypotheses that people would come up with the 1974 famous expedition collected one hundred thousand photos and 000 pounds of rock samples alvin made 17 dives and spent more than 80 hours on the sea floor they discovered vast fields of seafloor lava but found no evidence of active heat vents three years later forming a new expedition they sailed instead for the galapagos rift where they hoped to more easily measure the heat in the sediment the galapagos hydrothermal expedition launched in february of 1977 using alvin and a towed vehicle named angus you tore behind the ship and it has a camera system on it and it has sensors to detect temperature and so they would lower this over the sea floor and drive it around they'll take 3000 images at a time they'd bring that vehicle up they would develop the film on board the ship and look at the roll of film they saw nothing but lava for thousands of images and then they had 13 that showed these massive clams that looked to be alive and then after that 13 images it went back to lava again and so they dove alvin dive 713 and they found one of the greatest discoveries i think in the history of deep ocean or marine science they found superheated water coming out of the sea floor which they were looking for but they didn't expect to find the mass amount of animal life that's there imagine if you were sitting in this tiny little vessel looking out the window and you were the first people to actually observe giant tube worms in their natural habitat right in the middle of a volcano on the bottom of the ocean so they were literally experiencing something that fundamentally changed the scope of what we know about the planet but also in that moment for them what a great experience i think they had a good idea that what they were going to see but i'm sure when they actually saw it it blew their minds the discovery of hydrothermal vents opened an entirely new field of ocean science and led to discoveries of vent systems around the globe including the highest temperature vents called black smokers where iron and sulfur combine to create black chimneys along deep cracks in the ocean's crust ocean scientists have built upon the initial finding ever since in 1991 a group of scientists chemists and geologists and biologists were going to the east pacific rise to go look at events that had been discovered two years before and they dove with alvin to where they saw hydrothermal vents chimneys lush communities of life there and all that was gone lava had come out threw fissures in the sea floor come out wiped out all the communities gone drained back into the earth and where it cooled and froze instantaneously on the seafloor cracks formed and so new venting came through those cracks so it was my phd project to look how the animals came back and recolonized these new vents dawn wright and tim shank were still graduate students when the alvin expedition dubbed adventure serendipitously happened upon this recent eruption in an area on the east pacific rise known as nine north and witnessed what became known as the tube worm barbecue 1991 was the closest that any scientists had come to actually witnessing a volcanic eruption on the sea floor in real time it was determined that their dive was within two weeks of the actual volcanic eruption so we were all blown away by that because of that discovery that particular area was really what they called ground zero subsequently there were literally hundreds of discoveries of new species so one discovery certainly leads to another and now we can keep going back to the area sampling observing mapping to see how a hydrothermal and a volcanic system evolves from that time zero the work to understand these otherworldly ecosystems continues today as scientists use alvin to explore and build upon the initial hydrothermal vent discovery nearly 45 years ago most of the work that i do and like all of my colleagues like is because of that that one discovery that was in 1977 which is the year that i was born and that i get to use that same tool even though it's been changed a lot but it's still alvin is still the same vehicle you know 40 years later which is really cool and you feel like you're a part of like the whole big story [Music] researcher jason sylvan teamed up with colleagues in 2019 on a series of alvin dives exploring how microbial communities near hydrothermal vents change over time specifically when these vents stop venting populations you see on active vents look very different from those on inactive events but when you collect a vent that's already dead you don't know how long it's been dead and so this experiment involved going to the sea seafloor collecting a lot of samples from those vents and putting them into these chambers that we then left on the seafloor for periods of a week and a year so that we knew exactly how long it had been since the venting stop and then we bring it back to the lab and we extract all of the dna from kind of all of the microbes that are living on that rock jason's team then sends this community dna out to a sequencing facility for analysis that tells us not only what microbes are present so basically the identities of the microbes how abundant they are you know is it jack and jane or jill and mike or all of them and so you could really put together the whole story of what a community is doing in addition to ongoing research like jason's the most exciting discoveries and significant findings may yet be ahead with alvin's latest upgrades there are environments that we're going to be able to go to that we didn't have access to in the past for example there's a new type of volcanism that's been discovered in the oceans called petite spots these are places in the deep ocean where an oceanic plate dives underneath another one there are these little structures that pop up that look like small sea mounts they're almost completely unexplored but now alvin's going to open up this new door for us to be able to get to these places we're going to figure out background standard data for what places look like now because we know the deep ocean is changing we see climate change having a big impact there's so many questions we have and so many issues that we have alvin's going to be a primary tool to meet those challenges the plan is for atlantis the mothership to complete its midlife refit and refresh in july of 2021 and we'll see it come back into service with the certification dives follow that with some science verification where the community will use the sub test out its new systems and then we'll go right into the routine science operations that the sub does with alvin now poised to continue its track record of groundbreaking research many who have been touched by its scientific discoveries point to an even bigger revelation alvin has brought together geologists geochemists microbiologists macrophagal biologists virologists it you know so many ologists have come together because of alvin wanting to use alvin together understanding the system and so the mothership atlantis becomes a microcosm of the scientific community this is astounding this vehicle has done this over time for us and develop relationships and collaborations that led to either greater discoveries and so i always give alvin credit for not just discovering events you know but taking the human ideas of science and bringing them together with other people and pushing science forward really accelerating the pace of discovery we are very fortunate to be able to have these experiences we really want others to have that opportunity this is a tool for the entire research community anyone with a good question should be able to get into alvin and try and answer it as alvin continues to mature into the world treasure that it has always been maybe there will be more opportunities for people of different walks of life to experience the ocean in alvin it's a small community but it's a growing community and i'm really looking forward to having other people have that experience with diving in alvin [Music] do [Music] major funding for this program was provided by the bachelor foundation encouraging people to preserve and protect america's underwater resources additional funding was provided in loving memory of david g perrault by the perot family endowment for environmental education [Music] you

Channel: South Florida PBS

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Length: 26min 47sec (1607 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 30 2021