After 50 years of cutting-edge seafloor exploration, the Alvin submersible—renegade deep-sea explorer for the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute—just got a long-deserved makeover. Alvin is the United States’ only deep-diving manned submersible used for science, so its upgrades will have a serious impact on the discoveries we can pull off in the deep.
To make a tricked-out sub, engineers first had to build a new personnel sphere, the titanium orb that protects the sub’s three passengers—one pilot, two scientists—from the crushing pressure of the water above them. Metalworkers cast two perfect hemispheres, 6 feet in diameter, and welded them together with an electron beam. Structural tests showed the sphere was safe to dive up to 6,500 meters below the surface, which opens up 98 percent of the seafloor to exploration.
After the sphere was finished, engineers built a new chasse around it, outfitted with improved tech for the scientists inside. Five HD cameras—up from three on Alvin’s previous iteration—record the scene for later analysis. Those cameras can see further, too, thanks to the high-intensity LEDs that ring the sub. And more and larger viewports provide overlapping fields of view, which allow scientists and pilots to coordinate sample collection with the sub’s robotic arms.
Those arms, by the way, got an upgrade too: They have a new shoulder joint that extends their reach to grab awkwardly placed samples. Once the team has snagged the right rocks, sediment, and animal specimens, they’re dumped on the bulked-up sampling platform, which can carry more than twice Alvin’s previous load to the surface.
After a full day’s work exploring the ocean’s depths, the new Alvin rises to the surface, anticipating a pick-up from its mother ship, the research vessel Atlantis. With the new brighter hue on the sub’s carbon fiber sail—the same international orange used on the Golden Gate Bridge—the ship has no trouble spotting it in the water. A faster recovery means a quicker route to the shipboard cold room, where precious samples are preserved. On shore, a giddy group of scientists will be waiting to start their analysis.
