Alvin Submersible Retired After 40 Years Work

An anonymous reader writes "The legendary deep-sea manned submersible Alvin is retiring after 40 years of scientific work. Alvin has taken 12,000 people on over 4,000 dives, helping to confirm plate tectonics and continental drift. It discovered hydrothermal vents, salvaged a hydrogen bomb from the Mediterranean Sea and explored the Titanic. Alvin will be replaced by a larger vehicle that will come into service in 2008."

Keep Both

[darkmeridian]

Is there any reason not to keep Alvin going along with its replacement? I'm sure some country or foundation is willing to run it. There's nothing top-secret in it, is there, considering that it is forty years old.

It is useful for a lot of research. Even though it is not as good as a new one, why not keep in it action?

Keeping both is a waste of money

[October_30th]

It is useful for a lot of research.

In the life of every scientific instrument comes the time when its capabilities are so much overshadowed by the more contemporary technology and its maintenance is such a drain on the funds that it simply must be retired. Sure you can do research with it, but it's low grade. They simply are not useful for good research anymore and maintaining them will take away funds from more important, new fields.

Personally, as a scientist, I don't much care what happens to what is essentially scrap metal at that point. In fact, I personally dismantled the equipment I did my PhD Thesis on in order to build another, better one. No tears shed there.

I also vote for keeping alvin alive, or elsewhere

[multi-flavor-geek]

I live right on the shore od lake Superior, and although only 1300 feet deep, there is strange stuff down there, and there are other places like Lake Tanganika, and Lake Baikal, that are incredibly deep, freshwater, and largely unexplored. Lake Tanganika may actually be an excellent research location considering that Africa happens to be ripping in half at that point.
How many people vote fo keeping Alvin alive as a more mobile research vessel, to research places other than the oceans, but some of the more confined bodies of water.

Re:Keep Both

[jrp2]

Is there a "wet smythsonian"?

I certainly agree, but why would they need a "wet Smithsonian"? Get it close on a ship and truck it to the site.

Here in Chicago we have a big-ass WWII German submarine [msichicago.org] on land in a museum. Yes, it is near Lake Michigan (several hundred meters), but it is definitely on land, now indoors.

I have no idea how it got from the lake to the museum, but this was done 50 years ago, and it is much, much larger than Alvin. I am quite confident Alvin could be dropped on a flatbed and trucked to the main Smithsonian (or whatever museum) quite easily (at least relatively easy compared to the German sub). It is definitely a "wide load", but not much more than one of those pre-fab houses you see on the highway occasionally, and D.C. is accessible to the ocean via the Potomac so you can get darn close by ship and truck it the last several kilometers.

I remember Alvin

[Mr. Protocol]

One of the best columns I ever wrote, and certainly one of the most fun to write, I wrote inside the Alvin. Not, I hasten to add, at the bottom of the ocean. It was in drydock down at Scripps Institute in San Diego at the time. I learned a lot about all sorts of things on that trip, including things like the esoteric outer reaches of battery charging, when you've got tons and tons of lead and acid to charge.

The magazine in which the column appeared was offered the opportunity to take Mr. P. on a dive, an opportunity which he would have accepted in a New York minute (hey, after all, he went for a boat ride on Grand Prismatic Spring: 160 degrees and no life jackets - what would be the point?), but as the trip would have cost the magazine the entire budget for publishing an issue, Mr. P. stayed sadly dry.

Alvin was an envelope-pusher from day one. The two halves of the titanium sphere that was the crew compartment were held together by one of the hardest titanium welding jobs ever done. The "penetrators" that carried the electronic wiring through the hull were always a concern. The inside of the sphere was unheated, so it "sweated" for the whole 12-hour dive. The pilot would check things out by wiping some of the "sweat" off the seam of a penetrator, if it looked like a "lot" of water, and would taste it for salt. Salt would have been a very, very bad sign.

Alvin did have an emergency ascent capability. Explosive bolts would shear the sphere clear of the boat-shaped outer chassis which contained the ballast, batteries and engines, allowing the sphere, a giant bubble, to race to the surface. The conning tower, though, was permanently attached, which meant that the sphere would spiral vigorously during the entire ascent, which would take twenty minutes or so. It was expected that the crew, under the best of circumstances, would be violently ill by the time they reached the surface, but they'd be alive.

This capability was never used, thank heavens.

Mr. Protocol wishes to thank Tom T. Tengdin for that golden opportunity.

Re:Keep Both

[Fallen Andy]

OK, so it *isn't* really 40 years old. There can't be much except the outer shell which hasn't been
replaced over the years. But, when it was made, it was made a little too small. You can't change that. Also, the new (competition) replacements
can dive deeper and thus explore much more of
that almost unknown world.

Most of the expertise and folklore (care and feeding if you will) needed to babysit it are pretty
much locked up in extraordinary dedicated folk who have spent most of their *life* playing with this wondrous toy.

Don't look for an owners manual. There isn't one.
Jokes about Buses aside, the competition is better, so it's time to move on.

(It would be *really* dangerous to hand this over to some other institution. Consider the ongoing problems with the decomissioned UK diesel subs and
Canada - some poor scientist in XXX country could
*die* if you just hand over Alvin without thought). Better to give it to the Smithsonian...

(But I think it's a safe guess the Wood's Hole folks will have a wake...).

Re:Keep Both

[ScottyUK]

I don't think he meant wet as in "seaborne", more wet as in "National Marine Museum", akin with National Air and Space Museum. A museum dedicated to "wet stuff" - marine equipment/history.

Age concerns

[Fortran IV]

Check out the history of Alvin [whoi.edu] at the Woods Hole site and you'll see that concerns about fatigue in a 40-year-old pressure hull are misplaced. Alvin has been repeatedly overhauled, with pressure hull and other components replaced. The vehicle has undergone recertification by the U.S. Navy every few years, most recently in 2002. In fact, Alvin has gone deeper in recent years; until 1994 the DSV was only certified to 4000m, not the present 4500m.

However, the next Alvin will be larger (27 more cubic feet in the pressure sphere, adding about the volume of a good-sized coffin!) and have greater range, both horizontally and vertically. As "Rosco" pointed out above, operating two DSV's at once would be much more expensive. And frankly, any lesser facility than Woods Hole that can afford to operate a DSV would probably prefer to build their own.

Still, I'm sad to hear Alvin will be retired. Alvin was the first name I learned in deep-sea research as a child, as Jacques Cousteau was the first for shallower waters. A long and brilliant career, averaging (even with overhauls and most of one year stuck on the sea floor) better than a dive every four days for forty years.

The next best thing to being there

[jalefkowit]

I feel almost like I've taken a dive on Alvin myself... I work for an ocean conservation group [oceana.org], and this summer one of our staff scientists got the chance to go along on a NOAA expedition that used Alvin to dive on some Alaskan seamounts (mountains at the bottom of the ocean).

Before he left for the trip, I talked him into keeping a journal of it for our organizational blog [oceana.org]. Each time he made a new entry, he would e-mail it to me from Alvin's mother ship in the Gulf of Alaska, and then I would post it to the site in as close to real-time as possible. (He wanted to post the entries directly, but we were lucky to get e-mail access for him aboard ship, much less a reliable Web connection.)

You can read the archived journal here: Jon's Journal [oceana.org]

(The software defaults to showing the journal entries in reverse chronological order, so the one on top is the last one. Scroll to the bottom and read up to start from the beginning.)

We both just kind of figured it would be something interesting to try, but the result was really cool -- he did a great job describing what it's like to be on an Alvin expedition.

It was actually near the end of his trip that I first heard that Alvin was slated for retirement. From a mechanical perspective, it makes sense; she's seen a lot of wear under some of the most demanding conditions imaginable. It's that very history that makes it hard to imagine seeing her put to pasture, I guess. Here's hoping that we as a people have the vision and commitment to keep exploring the paths down which Alvin took those first tentative steps.