The expedition in Puerto Rico will be the first time that Alvin has ventured into the hadal zone, the deepest and least understood region of the ocean. If the tests go well, the Navy will officially authorize Alvin for regular crewed expeditions to that depth, and the submarine will spend most of the next five years in the water around the US conducting scientific research until its dragged back to Massachusetts for its regular tuneup. By the end of the week, Alvin will have reached its maximum depth and touched the seafloor in the abyssal trenches off the Puerto Rican coast. Over the course of a week, Alvin and its crew will dive progressively deeper in roughly 500 meter increments. Next September, Alvin will be transported by ship to Puerto Rico, where it will begin its first wet tests. If everything goes well, the Navy will give the Woods Hole team the go-ahead to begin tests in the water. Next, a three-person crew will spend 12 hours inside Alvin on the shore to test its life support system again.
SUBMARINE CARTOON BIG FULL
The first tests of the full vehicle will be uncrewed and will demonstrate that Alvin can run its life support systems for 24 hours without creating any harmful gases that would endanger its passengers. Once engineers at Woods Hole have put the finishing touches on Alvin in the spring, it will undergo a rigorous testing process to prepare for its first dive to 6,500 meters. As part of the upgrade, Alvin will get some more powerful thrusters mounted to its back end, a suite of sophisticated imaging systems, and an acoustic transmission system so that its occupants can wirelessly send images and metadata from the bottom of the ocean to a ship on the surface.
SUBMARINE CARTOON BIG UPGRADE
Two jointed sampling arms-the upgrade will give it a third-extend from the front of the crew sphere and are used to shovel up to 500 pounds of sediment and other material into a sample hold on the craft. It has a portly white hull with a metallic crew sphere protruding from the front of its belly, and a bright red fin up top. “It really opens up a lot of opportunities.”Īlvin is a cross between a robotic laboratory and excavator. “We’ll have access to almost the full ocean,” says Strickrott. This upgrade alone will extend Alvin’s maximum depth by more than a mile and put approximately 99 percent of the seafloor within its reach. Arguably the most important improvement is Alvin’s new titanium ballast spheres and a pressurized crew compartment that will enable the submarine to carry up to three occupants just over four miles below the surface. During that trip, he and a team of oceanographers and US Navy observers will push the submarine to 6,500 meters-far deeper than it has ever gone before.Įarlier this month, Strickrott and a small team from Woods Hole presented the progress on Alvin’s upgrades at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union, which was held remotely as a precaution against the pandemic. When Alvin hits the water again next autumn for a trip into abyssal trenches near Puerto Rico, Strickrott will be among the first to pilot what is effectively a brand new vessel. By the time Alvin’s makeover is wrapped up in late 2021, the storied submarine will rank among the most capable human-rated deep sea submersibles in the world.
Since the end of that expedition, Alvin has been ashore getting a major upgrade at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, which operates the submersible on behalf of the US Navy. Alvin makes dozens of trips to the seabed every year, but the mission to the methane seep this spring marked a milestone in Strickrott’s career as an explorer: It was the last time that the sub would have meaningful limits on how deep it could dive. Since he first started working on Alvin as an engineer nearly 25 years ago, Strickrott has logged more than 2,000 hours in the deep ocean, where he learned to expertly navigate the seabed’s alien landscape and probe for samples with the submarine’s spindly robotic arms. It was the final dive of a month-long expedition that had taken the crew from the Gulf of Mexico up the East Coast, with stops along the way to explore a massive deep sea coral reef that had recently been discovered off the coast of South Carolina.įor Bruce Strickrott, Alvin’s chief pilot and the leader of the expedition, these sorts of missions to the bottom of the world are a regular part of life. The submarine’s pilot and two marine scientists had just returned from collecting samples around a methane seep, an oasis for carbon-munching microbes and the larger species of bottom dwellers that feed on them. In early March, a gleaming white submarine called Alvin surfaced off the Atlantic coast of North Carolina after spending the afternoon thousands of feet below the surface.
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