Posted on 02/04/2025 9:08:08 AM PST by Red Badger
Alvin sampling a hydrothermal vent in 2021. Photo: WHOI-MISO, D. Fornari, S. A. Soule, WHOI/NSF/2022, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
The Alvin submersible is now capable of diving to 21,325 feet (6,500 meters), putting 99% of the ocean floor within its reach.
Alvin’s upgrade has been in the works for over four years, with its last iteration completed in 2021. The veteran submersible can now dive nearly 6,700 feet (2,000 meters) deeper than before, enabling scientists to explore the ocean’s most abyssal recesses.
“The new maximum depth puts roughly 98-99% of the global seafloor in reach —including the lower Abyssal Zone and the upper Hadal Zone, home to ultra-high-temperature hydrothermal vents, newly discovered volcanic processes, untold mineral resources, and much more,” said Anna Michel, chief scientist of the National Deep Submergence Facility, which operates Alvin, in an emailed statement.
Alvin is a human-operated vehicle, or HOV, setting it apart from autonomously underwater vehicles (AUVs) and remotely operated vehicles (ROVs). It can be crewed by two people and dive for up to 10 hours at a time, and up to 30 days in a row before requiring scheduled maintenance.
You may remember the intrepid craft for its visit to the wreck of Titanic in 1986. The vehicle has been in operation since 1964, making it over 60 years old, and has been overhauled and updated multiple times in its tenure.
As reported by Eos, the Alvin team conducted a set of dives in summer 2022 to test out the submersible’s latest upgrades. All six dives were successful, showcasing that the vehicle could indeed dive thousands of feet deeper than before.
Components of Alvin’s design, including its titanium personnel sphere, were completed back in 2012, but beginning in 2020 a slew of other upgrades began. Engineers endowed the old sub with new ballast spheres, a new manipulator arm, upgraded hydraulics, a 4K imaging system, and brand new thrusters.
“This also gives the science community an unprecedented opportunity to visit a critically under-studied part of the planet that plays a role in carbon and nutrient cycling and that will offer a view into how life might be evolved to conditions in oceans beyond Earth,” Michel added. Indeed, life at the ocean’s depths is a hint at how life might look should it exist in subsurface oceans on moons like Europa or Enceladus.
The deep sea is filled with biodiversity, much of which looks strange compared to life on land. Consider the glowing nudibranch identified late last year, after mystifying scientists with its perplexing structure for over a quarter century. Alvin’s new depth certification will enable scientists to see more of the creatures and hydrological systems that make up the alien world at the bottom of the sea.
You can read about Alvin’s incredible history here, in a story celebrating the submersible’s 60th anniversary.
LOL
Do we measure a person's height as length?
Is it six feet tall or six feet long?
How about six feet deep?
Again, depth, not length.
Altitude, elevation, depth are usually measurements in a vertical plane.
Mile, kilometer, furlong, league are usually measurements in a horizontal plane.
Yeah, and no one did it afterward for a long time, at which point, the depth of the Trieste’s descent right to the seafloor turned out to have been slightly less deep than measured at the time. This is a little creepy, check it out:
[snip] After passing 9,000 metres (30,000 ft), one of the outer Plexiglas window panes cracked, shaking the entire vessel. The two men spent twenty minutes on the ocean floor. The temperature in the cabin was 7 °C (45 °F) at the time. While at maximum depth, Piccard and Walsh unexpectedly regained the ability to communicate with the support ship, USS Wandank (ATA-204), using a sonar/hydrophone voice communications system. At a speed of almost 1.6 km/s (1 mi/s) – about five times the speed of sound in air – it took about seven seconds for a voice message to travel from the craft to the support ship and another seven seconds for answers to return. [/snip]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trieste_(bathyscaphe)#The_Mariana_Trench_dives
Given the stress and material fatigue, I wonder could a sub like Trieste have returned to that depth or is this a once or twice event and then you have serious limits placed on the sub?
It’s a great way to test the design. I’m not too sure I’d have been aboard for that. ;^)
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