Alvin is a deep submersion vehicle designed to explore the ocean floor, with a crush depth of 15,000 feet. It is made of syntactic foam and has been used for various scientific achievements, including recovering a lost hydrogen bomb and exploring hydrothermal vents and the RMS Titanic wreck.
Alvin is a deep submersion vehicle (DSV), the first of its class, designed to explore the ocean floor. Modern nuclear submarines, such as the US-class Seawolf, have a crush depth of 2,400 feet (730 m), while the DSV has a crush depth of 15,000 feet (4,000 m). Alvin was built at General Mills’ Electronics Group and commissioned on June 5, 1964. Weighing 16 tons, it is owned by the United States Navy and operated by Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. During its more than 40 years of oceanographic service, the vehicle has received a complete overhaul on several occasions.
This DSV was built to replace bathyscaphes and other less maneuverable research vehicles. One of its primary structural materials is syntactic foam, a composite material made up of glass microspheres embedded in an epoxy resin matrix. Syntactic foam is buoyant, yet can withstand extreme pressure. At its maximum depth, the pressure on the vehicle is equivalent to 40 atmospheres.
Because so few ships of her class have been built, Alvin can boast multiple unique achievements, both practical and scientific. On April 7, 1966, he was employed to recover a 1.45 megaton hydrogen bomb lost in a US Air Force refueling accident known as the Palomares hydrogen bomb incident. A mathematical technique, Bayesian search, was used to decide which areas of the ocean floor to search. The search lasted several weeks.
In 1977, Alvin made a major breakthrough by locating black smokers, a type of hydrothermal vent, around the Galapagos Islands in the Pacific. Black Smokers are notable for hosting one of the few ecosystems on Earth that are completely independent of the energy of the Sun. Around these vents, chemotrophic bacteria thrive on the chemicals released, allowing for the growth of animals that feed on them. such as mussels, shrimp and tube worms.
One of Alvin’s most famous applications of oceanography was his exploration of the RMS Titanic in 1986. Video footage taken from the submarine has been featured in several television documentaries, and many of the photos have also been published by the National Geographic Society, a major sponsor of the shipment.
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