COLUMN ONE : A Magical Journey to the Deep : The ride down to the ocean’s floor is not for claustrophobics. But a trip in the Alvin is worth the rare chance to see an eerie world of scientific and natural wonders.
The 6 1/2-foot spherical titanium capsule is cramped and growing cold, communications with the mother ship are distorted, and the hostile outside environment is shrouded in blackness as we descend to a surface all but unknown to humans.
Exterior lights illuminate a field of flattened, rough-hewn boulders and slate-gray rocks, nestled in a bed of sand. Some sort of life form, appearing as a translucent, sausage-shaped slug, seems unbothered by our arrival.
We are hovering in an area that has never seen sunshine--where exposure to the crushing pressure would bring instant death--so that we might better understand how this planet was formed.
We are at the bottom of the ocean.
And this will be one hell of a geological field trip for 16 scientists, technicians and student researchers who, two by two, will be making similar trips to 6,000 feet below the ocean’s surface.
They are participating in what, for most, is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity: to dive in the Deep Submergence Vehicle Alvin to study an ancient deep-sea volcano in the Pacific.
An hour after plunging into blackness, we turn on floodlights to expose a surreal tableau of sand and lava. It is disrupted by an occasional shock of soft, orange coral, scrambling shrimp and bulbous-headed fish.
For two weeks, our base camp is Atlantis II, a 210-foot research vessel run by the Woods Hole, Mass., Oceanographic Institution.
Capable of staying out for weeks at a time--and assigned to sea duty eight months out of 12--the Cape Cod-based Atlantis II is home to a crew of 23, plus half a dozen technicians. And it can accommodate up to 19 scientists, including this group, most of whom had never gone to sea because they were more accustomed to studying geology on dry land. One of their biggest concerns is seasickness.
But to a person, they don’t want to miss an opportunity to take advantage of the Alvin, the most active, if no longer the deepest-diving, of the world’s seven deep-sea submersibles.
The Alvin, owned by the Office of Naval Research, was initially designed to study the deep sea for military purposes but is now typically used, with National Science Foundation funding, to plumb answers shrouded in depths to about 14,700 feet.
Some of its journeys have become the stuff of suspense and intrigue.
Two years after its 1964 creation, the Alvin located a hydrogen bomb that had fallen into the Mediterranean off Spain after the collision of two U.S. Air Force bombers.
In 1985, Woods Hole scientists discovered the Titanic, two miles below the surface in its North Atlantic tomb; the next year, the Alvin landed on the Titanic’s foredeck and dispatched a robot camera inside the ship.
But the Alvin’s primary mission has been to slip scientists into the abyss to seek the Earth’s secrets, not mankind’s misfortunes.
It struck a treasure trove in 1979 when its handlers discovered hydrothermal vents near the Galapagos Islands off Ecuador.
There, nourished not by the sun but by a stream of scalding sulfurous effluent spewing from within the Earth, colonies of clams, mussels and tube worms flourished where it was thought impossible. Did primordial life commence at these orifices?
The Alvin has returned scientists to those and other hot water vents in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans, as researchers consider whether chemicals or light might have stoked the first life on Earth. The discovery has forced the revision of some of the most basic tenets in biology texts.
A Different Mission
This time, the Alvin is on a different mission. A veteran of more than 3,000 dives, the battery-powered, untethered submersible is being dispatched about 450 miles south of the Mexican Pacific seaport of Manzanillo to Seamount 6, a 4,950-foot-high volcano that erupted about 3 million years ago in the foothills of the East Pacific Rise.
It is along these deep-sea mountain ranges, which snake around the globe like the seams of a baseball, that magma replenishes the Earth’s crust as it inexorably drifts toward the continents along tectonic plates.
The details of that process remain generally hidden from scientists, however. Two-thirds of the Earth’s surface is under water and inaccessible to geologists, who bemoan that they know more about the surface of Venus than most of our own planet.
Among the secluded mysteries is the nature of deep-sea volcanic eruptions; only one has been witnessed by scientists.
Do they erupt as fiery fountains, quickly quenched by the frigid water? Do they belch mightily in a single outburst, throwing out huge plugs of magma before quieting down almost as quickly? Do they ooze magma to the surface like an uncapped tube of toothpaste?
Scientists are especially confused about why and how black glass is formed at deep-sea volcanoes such as Seamount 6, which may shed light on the formation of the Earth’s crust over the past 4.5 billion years.
Nine one-day dives in the Alvin are planned, under the direction of University of Hawaii geologist Rodey Batiza, who specializes in rock chemistry and submarine volcanoes. The National Science Foundation funded Batiza’s two-year study group with $215,000 plus the use of the Atlantis II and the Alvin for two weeks. Each day’s dive costs about $25,000.
By the time this trip is completed and dissected, Batiza says--with the scientists’ observations, the videos, the slides and 1,200 pounds of rocks taken as scientific souvenirs--this square-mile swath of Seamount 6 will have become the most intensely studied deep-sea volcano in the world.
Huddled in ‘the Ball’
Seasickness, it turns out, would be of little concern during the Alvin’s dives--below the surface, there is no smoother ride in the world.
But claustrophobia is a different matter. During trips of seven to nine hours, inside a dimly lit cockpit, the two passengers will huddle against the curving wall and play a constant game of footsie as legs intertwine, while the pilot perches atop a small box and looks forward.
Each observer peers out a porthole no larger than a softball. They know that the pressure two inches away is 200 times greater than at the surface.
Viewed from the outside, the 17-ton Alvin looks deceivingly large. It is 23 feet long and 12 feet high, with two hydraulic mechanical arms and video cameras mounted in front, framing the pilot’s own Cyclops porthole.
It looks like a mechanical water beetle; if beauty is in the eye of the beholder, this submersible could be a pinup for engineers. Most of the Alvin’s bulk, hidden behind its protective exterior skin, consists of batteries, motors, ballast tanks, hydraulics and buoyancy devices. Its three occupants are squeezed inside the 78-inch-diameter sphere, simply called “the ball.”
The ball’s interior lining is covered with electronic gear and computers. Refitted over the years, the Alvin features a CD player.
Except for flashlights, the only illumination inside is the red glow of instrument panels and three small video monitors.
The least technical equipment on board: a small plastic jug, a poor substitute for a toilet, euphemistically called a HERE bottle, for Human Endurance Range Extender.
Each observer brings a pillowcase stuffed with sweatshirt, pants, wool socks and a cap. As the frigid ocean chills the unheated vessel, passengers can bundle up.
Focusing on Magma
Batiza--who has made more than 30 dives in the Alvin--invited five graduate students and an undergraduate to join the seven professors and researchers, three technical consultants and one journalist on this two-week trip to sea. The party is complemented by undersea drilling experts from the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute and the Ocean Drilling Program from Texas A & M.
Before heading to sea, we spend three days at Manzanillo for preliminary science meetings. We are trying to find out how volcanoes erupt when magma breaks through the ocean floor. The dynamics are affected by not only the water pressure but the almost instantaneous interaction of 2,000-degree Fahrenheit molten rock with 35-degree water.
Incredible time and detail is spent on the shape and amount of lava we expect to witness, because such details will offer clues as to how the volcano erupted. Lava may appear as soft pillows, fractured blocks, sharp-edged rubble or flowing sheets of rough pavement. One particular shape of lava confounds the scientists’ nomenclature--they describe it as something akin to what would be found in a kennel.
“Rocks aren’t really boring,” says geology professor James White of New Zealand’s University of Otago. “But they get bad press.”
Cramped Quarters
It takes two days to get to our destination in the eastern Pacific.
Before my dive, I climb down the Alvin’s 20-inch-wide hatch for orientation and check-out with my observation partner--Jill Karsten, Batiza’s wife and a University of Hawaii geologist who has dived in the Alvin twice before.
The first debate is where to put our legs, and then we agree to shift in unison.
While we are being briefed, we are being observed as well.
“We want people in the ball ahead of the time to see how they react to the tight confines,” chief the Alvin pilot Pat Hickey says later. “We had to stop a launch once because someone realized he was claustrophobic.”
We are told to keep our hands off all buttons and switches and instructed on using the radio in case the pilot becomes incapacitated.
Batiza has assigned me not only the job of logging retrieved rock samples but making technical observations of the sea floor.
We will be Dive No. 3013 in the history of the Alvin, named after Allyn Vine, a Woods Hole engineer who championed manned deep-sea exploration.
Warned that the first half hour will be miserably hot, I wear only shorts, a T-shirt and cotton socks. Just before 8 a.m. I clumsily squeeze through the hatch. Karsten follows. Thin padding cushions us as we lean against the wall.
Hickey, our pilot and a veteran of hundreds of Alvin dives, is talking on the radio to the controllers on deck as the hoist lowers us onto the water. Two men are standing on the Alvin as we launch, and they unhook the ropes and free us as we bob. Before they jump into a motorboat, the small boat’s pilot looks for sharks.
Out our portholes is azure water; the monitors still show the surface and the sky above us, from the high-mounted exterior video cameras. Hickey inserts a New Age CD, “Celtic Odyssey.”
The water turns black as we drop, seemingly motionless, almost 100 feet a minute, weighted by about 1,000 pounds of steel bricks that ultimately will be left at the bottom. We’re spiraling down like a slow-moving corkscrew, Hickey says, but there is no sense of it.
As we begin to cool off, we pass through what appears as a swarm of fireflies: otherwise-invisible fish armed with specks of light-emitting chemicals to attract prey, along with luminescent jellyfish and other organisms.
The sounds inside the Alvin are unsettling at first, but soon become just so much background noise: the droning whir of the carbon dioxide scrubber that maintains the level of oxygen, the pings and whistles of sonar equipment, and later something that sounds like shotgun fire--the electronic noise created by the firing of photo strobe lights.
And Hickey kills time by telling war stories, like the time someone forgot to cap the HERE bottle and it toppled off a shelf. And the time a scientist, too proud to ask for a bag when he became nauseated, vomited even before the Alvin submerged; his clothes were sealed in a bag and he spent the rest of the trip wrapped in a blanket.
On the way down, we can barely hear the creaking of compressing metal.
When we reach the bottom, Hickey turns on the floodlights, revealing remarkably clear water and a plain of rippled, sandy sediment interrupted by small lava boulders. Nearby, the water reflects the soft blue hue of dawn, but farther off it dissolves into blackness.
I’m disappointed that there is no immediate greeting by strange deep-sea life, but as the Alvin motors--about 1 mph--toward some rocks, I’m delighted by the sight of a lavender slug, maybe the size of a plump kielbasa.
Our mission is to describe in detail the lava features we encounter, and note their location, based on coordinates accurate to within a meter, thanks to computers and three sonar transponders previously placed in the ocean.
I press my face against the porthole and, talking into my tape recorder, try to recall the appropriate scientific terms to describe the lava: hyaloclastite sheet flows, ropy pahoehoe, jumbled lava, bulbous pillows, lobate blisters. But I become flustered, and at one site I describe what looks like Paul Bunyan’s sugared Grape Nuts. Well, make that a field of small, fractured lava with a 50% dusting of sediment.
The unheated cabin is chilly now--the back of my neck is clammy--but I don’t want to struggle with my sweats. Soft wipes are used to clean condensation on the porthole.
Signs of life become easy distractions from the lava as Hickey, not a moment too soon, exchanges an Oingo Boingo CD with one by flamenco guitarist Ottmar Liebert.
An almost transparent, tadpole-shaped rat-tail fish darts toward us; its head is way too large for its tail. Minutes later, an eel wiggles by. In time I spot a starfish here, a “sea cucumber” there. Every few minutes we pass over coral--some shaped like fine-webbed fans, others like tumbleweeds.
But mostly we are propelled over lava and sand, sand and lava, and Karsten is rhapsodizing into her tape recorder.
Lunch comes from a brown bag: ham and cheese sandwich, a pear and a Milky Way. I pass on coffee because I want nothing to do with the HERE bottle.
By 1:15 p.m. it is starting to rain inside the Alvin--condensation dripping from above.
Hickey is using the claws of the hydraulic arm to wrest pieces of lava off the sea floor and deposits them into nine steel-mesh baskets mounted on the Alvin’s exterior.
When he comes across a soft, fern-like piece of coral, he carefully breaks it off at its stem and deposits it in a basket. Biologist friends, he says, treasure these specimens, which he’ll freeze and mail to them.
At another site, the Alvin’s claw reaches out for a rock, which crumbles in its grasp. Hickey curses, shifts a few feet to the side and grabs a different sample at Karsten’s direction.
We settle into such a focused routine that we could almost forget where we are.
The inescapable sound of electronics and machinery turns into so much white noise. With the distractions and work at hand, claustrophobia is not an issue.
The afternoon passes with occasional signs of life: a spindly legged sea spider that looks like a daddy longlegs slowly crawling over a rock, orange shrimp frenetically swimming, more lavender slugs. A pumpkin-colored starfish is flaccidly draped over lava in right angles like in a Salvador Dali clock painting.
By now I am almost dulled to the beauty of the sand itself, its ripples from a current emanating symmetrically into the darkness, and the various formations of lava--some looking like soft pillows, others like busted-up roads.
At 3 p.m., our battery power all but drained, Hickey announces matter-of-factly that we’re heading up. A video monitor shows ballast bricks falling so we can begin to float. As we steal our last glimpse of the ocean floor, he flicks off the floodlights and, again, we’re in blackness.
An hour later, as the view out the porthole lightens from indigo to blue to a sea-mist green, we pop to the surface, a titanium ball inside a white and orange skin, ready to be hoisted aboard Atlantis II.
As I climb out and the crew prepares the Alvin for Dive No. 3014 to the bottom, I’m feeling a little cold, a little sore, a little special.
