Alvin (DSV-2) is a crewed deep-ocean research submersible owned by the United States Navy and operated by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. The vehicle was built by General Mills' Electronics Group in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Named to honor the prime mover and creative inspiration for the vehicle, Allyn Vine, Alvin was commissioned on 5 June 1964. The submersible is launched from the deep submergence support vessel RV Atlantis (AGOR-25), which is also owned by the U.S. Navy and operated by WHOI. The submersible has made more than 5,000 dives, carrying two scientists and a pilot, to observe the lifeforms that must cope with super-pressures and move about in total darkness, as well as exploring the wreck of Titanic. Research conducted by Alvin has been featured in nearly 2,000 scientific papers.
Robert Duane Ballard is an American retired Navy officer and a professor of oceanography at the University of Rhode Island who is most noted for his work in underwater archaeology: maritime archaeology and archaeology of shipwrecks. He is most known for the discoveries of the wrecks of the RMS Titanic in 1985, the battleship Bismarck in 1989, and the aircraft carrier USS Yorktown in 1998. He discovered the wreck of John F. Kennedy's PT-109 in 2002 and visited Biuku Gasa and Eroni Kumana, who saved its crew. He leads ocean exploration on E/V Nautilus. Ballard considers his most important discovery to be that of hydrothermal vents.
A hydrothermal vent is a fissure on the seafloor from which geothermally heated water discharges. They are commonly found near volcanically active places, areas where tectonic plates are moving apart at spreading centers, ocean basins, and hotspots. Hydrothermal deposits are rocks and mineral ore deposits formed by the action of hydrothermal vents.
The seabed is the bottom of the ocean. All floors of the ocean are known as 'seabeds'.
The East Pacific Rise is a mid-ocean ridge, a divergent tectonic plate boundary located along the floor of the Pacific Ocean. It separates the Pacific Plate to the west from the North American Plate, the Rivera Plate, the Cocos Plate, the Nazca Plate, and the Antarctic Plate. It runs south from the Gulf of California in the Salton Sea basin in Southern California to a point near 55° S, 130° W, where it joins the Pacific-Antarctic Ridge trending west-southwest towards Antarctica, near New Zealand. Much of the rise lies about 3200 km (2000 mi) off the South American coast and rises about 1,800–2,700 m (6,000–9,000 ft) above the surrounding seafloor.
The Lost City Hydrothermal Field, often referred to simply as Lost City, is an area of marine alkaline hydrothermal vents located on the Atlantis Massif at the intersection between the Mid-Atlantic Ridge and the Atlantis Transform Fault, in the Atlantic Ocean. It is a long-lived site of active and inactive ultramafic-hosted serpentinization, abiotically producing many simple molecules such as methane and hydrogen which are fundamental to microbial life. As such it has generated scientific interest as a prime location for investigating the origin of life on Earth and other planets similar to it.
Marine geology or geological oceanography is the study of the history and structure of the ocean floor. It involves geophysical, geochemical, sedimentological and paleontological investigations of the ocean floor and coastal zone. Marine geology has strong ties to geophysics and to physical oceanography.
In biology, abiogenesis or the origin of life is the natural process by which life has arisen from non-living matter, such as simple organic compounds. The prevailing scientific hypothesis is that the transition from non-living to living entities was not a single event, but an evolutionary process of increasing complexity that involved the formation of a habitable planet, the prebiotic synthesis of organic molecules, molecular self-replication, self-assembly, autocatalysis, and the emergence of cell membranes. Many proposals have been made for different stages of the process.
Richard Arthur Lutz is an American marine biologist and deep-sea oceanographer. He is known for deep-sea research using the Alvin submersible, and is considered one of the world's foremost authorities on the ecology of deep-sea hydrothermal vents.
Cindy Lee Van Dover is the Harvey Smith Professor of Biological Oceanography and chair of the Division of Marine Science and Conservation at Duke University. She is also the director of the Duke University Marine Laboratory. Her primary area of research is oceanography, but she also studies biodiversity, biogeochemistry, conservation biology, ecology, and marine science.
The Beebe Hydrothermal Vent Field is located just south of Grand Cayman in the Caribbean, on the north side of the Mid-Cayman Spreading Centre in the Cayman Trough. Approximately 24 kilometres (15 mi) south of Beebe is the Von Damm Vent Field.
Matthew Schrenk is an assistant professor in geomicrobiology at Michigan State University. His research focuses on the diversity, distribution, and activities of microorganisms in the deep subsurface biosphere. His work couples molecular biological approaches and geochemical analyses to investigate microbial ecosystems. Schrenk investigates high pH environments fueled by underground serpentinization reactions between water and certain rock types and hydrothermal vent systems along the ocean floor that are driven by volcanic activity.
Kenneth Craig Macdonald is an American oceanographer and marine geophysicist born in San Francisco, California in 1947. As of 2018 he is Professor Emeritus at the Department of Earth Science and the Marine Sciences Institute at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). His work focuses on the tectonics and geophysics of the global mid-oceanic ridge including its spreading centers and transform faults, two of the three types of plate boundaries central to the theory of plate tectonics. His work has taken him to the north and south Atlantic oceans, the north and south Pacific oceans, the Indian Ocean, the Red Sea and the Sea of Cortez, as well as to the deep seafloor on over 50 dives in the research submersible ALVIN. Macdonald has participated in over 40 deep sea expeditions, and was Chief- or Co-Chief Scientist on 31 expeditions.
Kathleen (Kathy) Crane is an American marine geologist, best known for her contributions to the discovery of hydrothermal vents on the Galápagos Rift along the East Pacific Rise in the mid-1970s.
The RISE Project was a 1979 international marine research project which mapped and investigated seafloor spreading in the Pacific Ocean, at the crest of the East Pacific Rise (EPR) at 21° north latitude. Using a deep sea submersible (ALVIN) to search for hydrothermal activity at depths around 2600 meters, the project discovered a series of vents emitting dark mineral particles at extremely high temperatures which gave rise to the popular name, "black smokers". Biologic communities found at 21° N vents, based on chemosynthesis and similar to those found at the Galapagos spreading center, established that these communities are not unique. Discovery of a deep-sea ecosystem not based on sunlight spurred theories of the origin of life on Earth.
Project FAMOUS was the first-ever marine scientific exploration by manned submersibles of a diverging tectonic plate boundary on a mid-ocean ridge. It took place between 1971 and 1974, with a multi-national team of scientists concentrating numerous underwater surveys on an area of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge about 700 kilometers west of the Azores. By deploying new methods and specialized equipment, scientists were able to look at the sea floor in far greater detail than ever before. The project succeeded in defining the main mechanisms of creation of the median rift valley on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, and in locating and mapping the zone of oceanic crustal accretion.
Deborah Sue Kelley is a marine geologist who studies hydrothermal vents, active submarine volcanoes, and life in these regions of the deep ocean.
Karen Louise Von Damm was an American marine geochemist who studied underseas hydrothermal vent systems. Her work on black smoker hot springs after they were first discovered on the mid-ocean ridge in 1979 significantly advanced understanding of how vent fluids acquire their chemical composition and how those chemicals support biological communities. An area of hydrothermal vents located just south of Grand Cayman in the Caribbean was named the Von Damm Vent Field in her honor.
John A. Baross is an American marine microbiologist and professor of oceanography and astrobiology at the University of Washington who has made significant discoveries in the field of microbial ecology of hydrothermal vents and the physiology of thermophilic bacteria and archaea.
Rachel Haymon is a marine geologist known for her work linking geological and biological processes occurring at deep-sea hydrothermal vents. In 2005 she was elected a fellow of the Geological Society of America.
