As Margie and I headed east, our horizons expanded with each mile. We made our way through deserts and tumbleweeds for 12 hours to El Paso, then through another nine hours of parched landscape to Dallas. We pulled over to watch a huge flock of Canada geese heading north to Yankee country, just like us. It seems improbable now, looking back on a life spent exploring the planet, but at that time I had never even been east of the Mississippi River. We crossed it at Vicksburg and toured the battlefield where Grant starved the Confederates out of a fort on the bluffs. I walked the terrain, imagining the battle unfolding. After that, Atlanta—and then Washington, D.C., for my magical first view of the nation’s monuments. Finally, up to Boston and our first taste of New England: a chaotic March snowstorm. I woke up the next morning, put on my crisp dress blues, ready for my first day at work—and immediately had to change back into jeans to dig the VW out of the snow.
It was a difficult introduction to the Northeast for a beachcomber from Southern California, and my first days at the Office of Naval Research weren’t much better. I had been training to be a warrior in the Army, then I got a great job designing submersibles and working on my Ph.D. Being activated by the Navy had meant a sharp detour with a huge pay cut. But here I was. I figured I’d do my duty and then head back to California.
My work involved monitoring grants to research institutions—just pushing around a bunch of papers, really. I was the liaison officer to several schools—MIT, the University of Rhode Island, and the University of New Hampshire among them. By far my largest grant recipient was the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, about an hour-and-a-half drive south of Boston.
I knew very little about Woods Hole. I’d dreamed for so long of joining Scripps that I hadn’t really focused on its East Coast rival, which also was home to a variety of research scientists studying the oceans. WHOI, as they called it, was located in a little New England village, quaint cottages with slate-shingle roofs, while Scripps was classic Southern California, rolling surf and all. In oceanographic circles, it’s a little like the Yankees versus the Red Sox. And it didn’t take long before I realized that I should spend a whole lot of time there.
There I was amid all the L.L. Bean apparel in my blue winter uniform. I wandered across the Water Street drawbridge over a narrow inlet connecting Nantucket Sound with Eel Pond, a small lagoon dominated by the Captain Kidd bar and seafood shack. And then, as I shivered on the bridge, I noticed something out on the pond.
Trim, white, 21 feet long, there it was: Alvin, a submersible capable of carrying three people down to explore the ocean to a depth of 6,000 feet. Owned by the Navy but operated by Woods Hole, it was on the pond undergoing some sort of testing. I was mesmerized by the sight of it and my sense of what it could do.
Alvin was the only submersible at any American oceanographic institution. Scripps didn’t even have one. Up until then, explorations of the deep-sea floor were conducted from the ocean surface, using sonar and other remote detection techniques. I could see that Alvin would make it possible for scientists to go underwater themselves and maneuver around to explore with their own eyes. That made it my kind of sea craft. Already, it had proven its worth by locating a hydrogen bomb that had fallen from an Air Force bomber during a midair collision and had sunk to the bottom of the Mediterranean. The thought of working in a manned submarine that relied on direct visual observation was exciting—just the sort of science I wanted to practice.
That first day at Woods Hole, I made my way through a gauntlet of introductions. It was like meeting the gods. First came the director of Woods Hole, Paul Fye. When I bragged about going to sea on Scripps vessels, he hit me with a gimlet eye and said, “Well, it’s nice to see you have finally worked your way up to the greatest oceanographic institution in the world.”
After that I met Kenneth O. Emery, known as K. O., an expert on continental shelves and one of the most celebrated students of Francis Shepard, the famous marine geologist. I also made a point of meeting Bill Rainnie, a former Navy submarine officer who ran Woods Hole’s Deep Submergence Group. He was Alvin’s gatekeeper.
Over the next two years, they all welcomed me into the Woods Hole circle. Dr. Emery even invited me to go out on Woods Hole research vessels as part of the science team, and my Navy boss said fine. It felt like I was back in graduate school. My dreams weren’t on hold anymore.
I started going full throttle, total focus. Alvin’s crew chief—George Broderson, or Brody for short—nicknamed me the “White Tornado” because of the way I sailed through Woods Hole in my summer white uniform, letting out all my pent-up energy.
Call it luck. Call it whatever. Somehow, I had ended up in the perfect place, and I found myself being embraced like a member of the family.
THROUGH A CONTACT AT MY NAVY OFFICE, I started hanging out with the Boston Sea Rovers, the most prestigious dive club on the planet. They were a hardy, eclectic group of about 20 men who didn’t mind freezing in the North Atlantic. We’d suit up and jump into the cold, dark water each weekend during dive season to search for lobsters, coming up with a supermarket full of food. One of my favorite guys in the group, Joe Hohmann, was so strong that he could carry two big air tanks on his back. He’d just stick his hand in a hole and let the lobsters bite him, and then he’d pull up these 20-pound suckers. At the end of the day, we’d all go to a deserted island, fill a trash can with moss, and cook up our catch. After each feast, we’d jump into the water to wash off the butter running down our wet suits.
For our annual weekend-long clinic, we’d kick off Friday night with a cocktail party at a grand place we called the Castle. Saturdays there were prominent speakers from the underwater world, like Jacques Piccard, who had taken the Navy bathyscaphe Trieste 38,500 feet down into Challenger Deep, the deepest part of the ocean. Saturday nights, we’d watch films that explored the oceans. Once, several members presented Frank Scalli, the master of ceremonies, with a huge lobster they walked across the stage like a dog on a leash, filling the room with raucous laughter. Each year’s weekend wrapped up with a lobster bake at Frank’s home. He was a scuba diver who represented U.S. Divers, a company owned by Jacques Cousteau, who was introducing scuba and underwater exploration to the world through television series like The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau.
It’s hard to express how much the Sea Rovers would influence my life. I watched how the best speakers drew us into their presentations with colorful underwater images. I met some of the best underwater photographers and filmmakers—Luis Marden and Bates Littlehales, for example, who worked for the National Geographic Society. I also met Melville Bell Grosvenor, the Society’s president and editor of National Geographic magazine from 1957 to 1967. He was the grandson of Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone and first president of the National Geographic Society. And at Sea Rovers meetings, I met the most famous underwater personalities of the time: Al Giddings, the cinematographer who would film The Abyss and Titanic, among many others; Rod and Valerie Taylor, known for films that got up close with sharks; Harold Edgerton, an MIT engineer who worked with Cousteau and others on underwater technologies; Eugenie Clark, an ichthyologist and scuba pioneer nicknamed “The Shark Lady”; Paul Tzimoulis, early advocate of scuba and publisher of Skin Diver magazine; Joe MacInnis, known for intrepid polar dives; Stan Waterman, pioneer diver and creator of underwater films and television specials; and Peter Gimbel, who dove to and photographed Andrea Doria. Jacques Cousteau and his son Philippe often joined us as well.
I listened as some of the Rovers described how they loved to pull on their scuba gear and dive on the wrecks of small ships and pleasure craft. I got really caught up in that idea. I must have wanted to up the ante, because Joe Hohmann remembers that even back then, in the late 1960s, I talked about wanting to find Titanic. Gee, I don’t know what this guy is smoking or drinking, Joe remembers thinking. He viewed my riffs on searching for Titanic, he says today, as just “a pipe dream.”
THEN, IN 1969, the Navy upended my life again.
The Vietnam War was draining the Pentagon budget, so the Navy needed to make cuts. Junior research officers like me were given a choice: Commit to a full-time career in the Navy or get out. I wanted to get my Ph.D., but I also needed a job.
I will never forget how Dr. Emery and Bill Rainnie supported me at a time when I really needed it. Dr. Emery suggested I enroll in Woods Hole’s Ph.D. program. But when other officials decided I couldn’t enroll in a degree program while I also worked there, Dr. Emery bailed me out again, arranging for me to commute to the University of Rhode Island’s Graduate School of Oceanography to finish my doctorate. Meanwhile, Rainnie said not to worry about a job—I was such a great talker that he’d hire me to promote Alvin in the ocean science community. If only there was another sunken H-bomb to search for, we’d get all the attention we need, I remember Bill saying—and I told him that if only Alvin could find Titanic, everyone would want to use it.
So I found myself out of the Navy and back in oceanographic research. The main thrust of my research was a geologic survey of the Gulf of Maine’s seabed. The concept of plate tectonics was just gaining traction: the theory that the planet’s surface consists of large crustal plates that bump into, grind against, or pull apart from one another in a massive synchronized ballet. Plates may move away from one another, creating new crust; or they may move toward each other, with old plates diving back inside Earth; or, as we now see in California’s San Andreas Fault, they may grind past one another and generate earthquakes. This picture of the dynamic changes in Earth’s crust occurring over eons is widely accepted now, but in those days, there were many skeptics. The theory made sense to me, though, and I felt that my research—which would focus on how the North American and Eurasian plates pulled apart beneath the Gulf of Maine, creating the North Atlantic—could help make the case.
Becoming a scientist means lots of reading—hundreds and hundreds of scholarly articles to catch up on the background and figure out what to focus on when I went out into the Gulf of Maine. Reading still did not come easily to me, though. When I took the Graduate Record Exam, I had scored in the 95th percentile in math, but my verbal score put me in the 41st percentile, 460 out of 800. I was aware of how much noise distracts me, too, so as I got into my research in the spring of 1970, I needed to find a place of silence where I could focus. Thank God for libraries.
Margie and I were living in a small house. Our son Todd was a year and a half, and another son, Douglas, was on the way. We needed more space, but we couldn’t afford much. I spotted a 16-room farmhouse in nearby Hatchville, near Falmouth, Massachusetts—a wreck of a place that had been built in the 1600s and was one step from the bulldozer. It cost only $20,000, and I put down $4,000 from the severance pay I’d gotten from the Navy. I told myself it showed promise and figured I could fix it up. But when my mother finally saw it, all she could muster was, “You’ve gotta be kidding.”
I also needed an outlet to burn off my excess energy, and I figured that rebuilding the house, room by room, would do the trick. I did all the plumbing, wiring, drywalling. I knocked down walls and busted up an old foundation from what was once the milking barn. I planted fruit trees to provide inexpensive food. Through it all, I developed a very disciplined ritual. I’d go up to the study I had built over the kitchen and read academic articles for 45 minutes. Then I’d reward myself with 15 minutes of work on the house, maybe smashing something with a sledgehammer. The key was to strictly limit my break time and get back to reading. I liked this pattern of mental, physical, mental, physical—which I maintain to this day.
I was working so hard just trying to make ends meet that I had little time for a social life. I didn’t get to dive with my Sea Rover buddies much once we moved to Hatchville. The only friends I had were my work colleagues. It didn’t help that Woods Hole was a small, insular community dominated by academics. Even the spouses tended to be highly educated. Margie had not gone to college, and I could tell that the intellectual atmosphere intimidated her. She didn’t feel comfortable socializing with those couples.
I had never been around so many professional women myself. My mother, smart as she was, had been a housewife and stayed home with the kids, as most mothers did in those days. I began to realize that my brother and I had both opted to marry housewives like our mother. Margie’s discomfort with the Woods Hole crowd was a little disconcerting, but I had so much else to do, I didn’t stop to think about it. And Margie was making friends on her own with some of the local residents.
MY PH.D. RESEARCH took me out on surface vessels into the Gulf of Maine, a basin created as the continental plates pulled apart. My goal was to create a 3-D image of this now buried terrain, collecting data to document the theory of plate tectonics. I blasted a compressed air gun every 20 seconds to penetrate the seabed, creating images of the hidden structures beneath it as the shock waves bounced back to the surface. The constant discharges were annoying, especially for anyone trying to sleep. One crew member lost it and came after me with a knife. Who thought science could be such a violent pursuit?
I also was applying for federal grants to equip Alvin with more tools. The little white sub was in dry dock when I started my research. It had flooded and sunk when cables broke during a launch, and it was being refurbished.
Land geologists jump into their Jeeps to climb the sides of volcanoes and zip out onto the plains. I’m a field geologist, too, just an undersea one, and I wanted to convert Alvin into my own jeep—something I could jump into and drive along the ocean bottom, banging on rocks and retrieving samples that could help sort out the geology of the seabed. I wanted to add a diamond-bit drill to extract rock specimens, and I needed acoustic transponders that I could drop into the water to track Alvin’s movements more precisely. Improvements like these would provide better data and allow other scientists to verify Alvin’s discoveries.
Sure enough, with new equipment and a revitalized Alvin, I started getting interesting results. Once I had brought up rocks from the floor in the Gulf of Maine, I studied their rates of radioactive decay, which allowed me to date them back about 180 million years ago, to the opening of the North Atlantic Ocean. These findings helped support plate tectonics theory—and showed the kind of science my little undersea field jeep could do.
In 1971 Xavier Le Pichon, a marine geophysicist at CNEXO (the National Center for Exploitation of the Oceans, a French government organization), wrote to Dr. Emery that his team wanted to dive in the rift valley of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. Part of the longest mountain range on Earth, it runs north and south down the middle of the Atlantic, from the Arctic to southern Africa, almost all underwater. Their goal was to map a 60-square-mile area about 400 miles southwest of the Azores that was thought to be a spreading center between two tectonic plates. Did we think, he asked, that submersibles could do a better job of mapping the region than sonar vehicles and other devices towed by surface ships? And could that provide further support for the plate tectonics theory?
In my mind, the French were interested in a technology transfer. Woods Hole was the juggernaut in deep submergence. We had Alvin, and we were developing the new tracking technologies. The French wanted that knowledge. But we also wanted to learn about the geology of the ridge, and I realized that an expedition like this could be my big breakthrough.
Emery asked me to draft a reply expressing support. Jim Heirtzler, the chairman of Woods Hole’s geophysics and geology department, took the lead, telling me to prepare a presentation on Alvin’s capabilities for a meeting at Princeton in January 1972. The giants of earth science from all over the world would be there. If all went well, the National Science Foundation would join the French in funding the project.
In oceanography, geophysicists are considered big thinkers, but they had only used sensors towed behind surface ships to map the ocean floor and determine its magnetic structure. No one had gone down to the seabed and actually seen the fresh lava flows that come out of Earth’s interior, forming new crust where plates were separating. The mega-thinkers needed observational scientists like me to ground their theories in fact.
Here I was, just a graduate student, the only “Mr.” in the group, invited to give a presentation on how I was using Alvin to gather these kinds of observations. I was down in one of Princeton’s lecture pits, looking up into the heavens filled with titans, and many of them were not too friendly. It was like Daniel going into the pit with the lions. My knees buckled, but I gave my talk. When I finished, Frank Press, a geophysicist from MIT and later the science adviser to President Jimmy Carter, asked with disdain what significant piece of science submersibles had ever accomplished.
Everyone in the room stared down at me as my mind scrambled. What could I say? Alvin hadn’t done much science yet. Then Bruce Luyendyk—a young upstart geophysicist with a Scripps doctorate who was working at Woods Hole—stood up. He was a cocky guy, and I love him to this day. He looked straight at Press and told him not to blame that on the submersibles. The scientific community had never tried to use them that deep down.
At dinner that evening, I sat across from Maurice Ewing, the founder of Columbia’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. He’d had a few drinks, and he wagged his finger at me. He said he might support the project, but added, “If you fail, we’ll melt that submersible down into titanium paper clips.” He really threw down the gauntlet.
My competitive instincts kicked in. We’re going to do it, I thought. The academy agreed, and the French-American Mid-Ocean Undersea Study, known as Project FAMOUS, came into being.
PREPARING FOR PROJECT FAMOUS required a huge shift from my dissertation research. I was jumping off the continental margin and into the deep ocean. I wasn’t trained in deep-sea science, but I was excited. Once they let us enter the Great Rift in our tiny submersibles, I thought, how could we miss? We’d be the first kids on the block, the first people to drive down into this world to see the crust forming and collect pieces of Earth’s new skin.
The plan was for the French to lead the show in 1973 in their bathyscaphe, Archimède. Given my experience with Alvin, I would be the only American to go with them. Then I would go out again the following year with the rest of the American team and Alvin, which was being outfitted with a new titanium hull that would double its diving depth to 12,000 feet—3,000 feet beyond what we needed to reach the valley.
Besides the science, the wonderful thing for me about being picked to work with the French is that I got to travel overseas. I went to France for planning meetings, and I became good friends with Jean Francheteau, one of the scientists, and Jean-Louis Michel, an engineer. Francheteau had gotten his Ph.D. at Scripps, where he had met his wife, Marta, a lovely American. He and I really hit it off. He was an earthy, handsome guy with curly hair and a great laugh—a man’s man in a French envelope. He also was absolutely brilliant.
He and Marta were living in an old farmhouse in Brest, in far western France, where the French government had an oceanography center. I stayed there with them, and Jean introduced me to escargots and cheeses and pâtés—fine French cuisine, all of it. I would walk with Jean to his office, and he’d forage for mushrooms along the way. He got me ready for living aboard the French research vessel. I grew up on meat and potatoes, but when you were on a French ship, they served you tongue and stomach linings, and it was eat or starve.
And so the summer of 1973 found me at sea, hovering above the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, as Le Pichon led the first dive in the bathyscaphe Archimède. An older type of submersible, it dwarfed Alvin in size but was far less maneuverable. It just went down and up like a freight elevator. I watched the project leader complete the first day’s work, knowing it would be my turn to go down in Archimède the next day.
I felt miserable when I woke up that August morning. I had been fighting a fever and strep throat, but I wasn’t going to bail on this opportunity. I gargled warm salt water and prepared to dive.
Three of us climbed into Archimède. My companions were a French naval officer and a French engineer. Their broken English was infinitely better than my French, which didn’t go much beyond “bonjour.” The bathyscaphe floated thanks to huge tanks full of aviation fuel, which is lighter than water, and it descended by flooding its air tanks with seawater and releasing some of the gas.
Down we went. It took 90 minutes to reach the seabed, and when we got there, the view was amazing. My eyes took it all in. Lava, solidified into black glasslike shapes, ran symmetrically in both directions along the central axis of the rift valley. This landscape was made up of relatively new crust. You couldn’t miss it. All of the controversy about plate tectonics evaporated just like that. The confirmation was right outside our viewport.
We maneuvered slowly and grabbed a rock sample with Archimède’s claw. Then something odd occurred. The vehicle’s nose suddenly tilted down, and the next thing I knew we were rising at top speed. I looked at the instrument panel. The needle on the amp meter had fallen. We’d had an electrical power failure, I thought, and it must have caused the electromagnets in the ballast tanks to release some of the heavy steel shot that Archimède normally discharged when it was ready to float back up to the surface. As we shot up, I heard the last thing you want to hear in that situation: “Au feu—Fire!” At the same moment, I smelled smoke.
My companions called up to the surface, speaking in fast French. We turned off the oxygen inside the sphere and grabbed our individual oxygen masks. But even with my mask, I was getting dizzy. Maybe I’m hyperventilating, I thought. I started to concentrate on my breathing, hard as that was with my swollen throat. I skipped breaths to lower my oxygen levels, but my head wasn’t clearing, and I was getting dizzier. Maybe there’s something wrong with my breathing apparatus, I thought, and I began to pull it off to inspect it. Thinking I was panicking, my French companions pushed it back down, and we struggled for a few moments. Then I saw realization dawn in the pilot’s eyes.
“Pardon, Bob,” he said, reaching up to turn a valve that started the flow of my oxygen. That was one of his jobs in an emergency. In the midst of our panic, he hadn’t done it, and I hadn’t thought about it myself.
I was fine after that. But every time I saw him later, he would reach up and go, “Pardon, Bob,” and pretend to turn on my oxygen. I didn’t think it was funny.
All told, the French made seven dives in Archimède during the first part of Project FAMOUS. When I returned home, I hunkered down for a final 10-month push to finish writing my dissertation, “The Nature of Triassic Continental Rift Structures in the Gulf of Maine.” My oral defense was another tense moment, with several faculty members tossing their toughest questions at me. But all the sacrifice paid off. I passed. I had my Ph.D. degree, and for the rest of my life, nobody could tell me that I couldn’t do it.
SPIRITS HIGH, ON JULY 1, 1974, someone called Dr. Ballard climbed aboard Alvin. It was just days after I had passed my Ph.D. orals, and we were returning to the Mid-Atlantic Ridge for the second phase of Project FAMOUS. The French would be working in the northern part of the rift valley with Archimède and a new saucer-shaped submersible, Cyana, while the American team would dive farther south in Alvin.
Cautious not to hit any of the instruments, three of us lowered ourselves into the little sphere, just six and a half feet in diameter. Picture all of the display panels and engineering crammed in. It was like climbing into a Swiss watch. Once inside, we folded up on the floor cross-legged and slid up against the pressure hull, where each of us had a little window. With our legs commingling in the narrow space, diving became a communal experience. We joked that when we got out of the sub, we’d have to untie our legs. With my tall frame, that joke wasn’t too far off the mark. We settled in with sweaters and sandwiches—diving traditions to ward off the cold and hunger during what was usually eight hours underwater.
The pilot went through the predive checks. It was over 90 degrees in there while Alvin was on the surface, but it would turn colder as we went deeper. When we received permission to dive, we flooded our air tanks with seawater to make them heavy and started to sink. It was a slow descent, about 100 feet a minute, or just over a mile an hour. It felt almost motionless. We were just sinking—we weren’t using the sub’s power to descend, because we wanted to save the battery to travel around on the bottom. Gravity was doing the work, and it took an hour and a half to drop down 9,000 feet.
People often wonder how I can contain my wild energy in such a cramped space for such a long period of time. I hyperfocus, primarily through my vision. My eyes are glued to the view outside. As we descend, that view becomes shrouded in darkness, and then I create the three-dimensional scene in my head by looking at what the instrument panels are showing me. Once on the bottom, Alvin’s lights illuminate the scene. I’m all eyes.
As we start to sink, all outside sounds fade, and all we can hear is the chorus of sounds of our instruments singing to us. The sonar makes a distinctive sh, sh, sh, sh, bing, bing, bing that changes as it detects the landscape around us. Occasionally a voice from our ship above comes in on the sound-powered telephone.
We start out in the upper layer with the sharks and dolphins. I call that the Cousteau layer—the sunlit part of the ocean that Jacques Cousteau featured in his TV shows. Cousteau spent most of his time in these shallower waters, and we like to say that we wave to him on our way to work.
Soon we enter the region where we see what we call the reverse snowstorm: particles of animals that died in the sunlit layer. Their bodies fall slowly, their remains collecting on the ocean floor at an average rate of a centimeter of thickness per millennium. These particles hardly weigh anything, so they create this snowing effect. Because we sink faster than the particles fall, the “snow” looks like it’s going up. That’s the only thing that gives us a sense of motion.
As we descend into the twilight zone—about 650 feet deep—the light begins to fade. By 1,000 feet, it’s pitch-black. Then we see the fireworks, the bioluminescence, because the motion of Alvin passing by disturbs creatures that light up. We just stare out the window at these stars blinking and kaleidoscopic lights going off. It’s magical, and very quiet. We drift into our own thoughts as we fall through these ocean worlds where most of the life on Earth exists. Sometimes I listen to music as I watch this world go by.
We then fall through the twilight zone, which includes the deep scattering layer, a world of strange creatures that rise at night to feed and then sink back down to avoid being eaten when the sun rises. This layer was named when a ship used an echo sounder to determine the depth to the bottom, but its sound beam bounced off the billions of tiny creatures found here.
Then we pass into the midnight zone at around 3,300 feet, where even less is going on. As we continue to fall, it’s hard to imagine that we are dropping down into a mountain range. We’re always thinking about climbing up into mountain ranges, not diving down into them. It’s like roaming around in a balloon in the Rockies with a flashlight at night. Sometimes I would play John Denver’s “Rocky Mountain High” as we dove. His voice sounded beautiful reverberating in our little sphere.
When we reach the point where there is little to see, it’s time to pull out the letters we’ve brought along from people asking for a souvenir from the deep. Our plan is always to write responses during the dive. We write notes including our names and the latitude and longitude we’re at as we write—just like what astronauts do in outer space. We’d write maybe 20 of these during a dive and mail them when we got back to land.
Atmospheric pressure is always a factor to be aware of as you dive this deep. When sitting on your porch at home or walking down the street close to sea level, you have one atmosphere of pressure on you, or 14.6 pounds of force on each square inch of your body. Once you go underwater, there’s another atmosphere of pressure on you for each 33 feet that you dive. By the time we get to 3,300 feet, we have 100 atmospheres, or 1,460 pounds, pressing on every inch of Alvin’s hull from the outside. By the time we reach 9,000 feet, we have almost two tons of pressure on each square inch of the hull, enough to kill us instantly if anything goes wrong. But fortunately, our pressure hull protects us from calamity just inches away.
EVERY DAY FOR ALMOST SEVEN WEEKS that summer, we dove down in Alvin, staying near the bottom for five hours before we had to head back to recharge the batteries. Each time it seemed a marvel, seeing the new crust where the tectonic plates were separating. But we couldn’t waste our time gawking. We took photographs, gathered rock samples, and pulled together the data to make a three-dimensional map of the area. We’d take a break for lunch—pepper steak, bologna, or peanut butter and jelly sandwiches—but once we were on the bottom, most of our time was spent at work. One major finding was that the gap where lava oozed up between the two tectonic plates was narrow, less than a kilometer wide. You could drive from one crustal plate to its opposing partner plate in a single dive.
On one of the dives, three of my colleagues were down in Alvin when events took a scary turn. I was on the surface ship, tracking their progress on a paper readout that plotted Alvin’s movements. When Alvin stopped to collect rock samples, the ink dots marking its location would grow into a blot. When it started moving again, the dots would turn back into a line.
After more than an hour, I noticed that the inkblot kept growing and growing and growing. They shouldn’t be staying in that spot that long, I thought. What’s going on? I got on a phone that transmitted sound waves through the water and called down to Jack Donnelly, the Alvin pilot, reminding him to move on. He said they were trying!!
Trying? My antennae went up. Walter Sullivan, a New York Times reporter, was on another ship, listening to our communications, and the dive team didn’t want to say there might be trouble. But something was keeping them from moving.
We needed to get another submarine down to help. I radioed my counterpart on the French ship—Gérard Huet de Froberville, captain of Archimède—and asked how he was doing. Then I innocently inquired when he might be getting back in the water.
His antennae went up, too. He got the point. He told me he was thinking he might come over to us. I told him that would be a good idea.
As the French rescue team headed our way, the phone beeped. Alvin’s pilot was on the line, saying they were fine and were continuing their exploration.
After they surfaced, I learned why that blot had kept getting bigger. When volcanoes erupt, they produce mounds of fresh lava. The motion of the plates pulls the lava apart and creates cracks that eventually reach the depth of a magma chamber—a pool of molten rock beneath Earth’s surface. Then the chamber erupts. The crew had been exploring one of these cracks, and it looked so wide they thought there was enough room for Alvin to go down into it to see the internal layering of the lava flow.
But when a submersible goes down, it doesn’t go straight down. It goes forward and down. Our guys went forward and down into the fissure, but they forgot that they would need clearance above them when it was time to go back up. As they had moved into the fissure, it had closed in over their head. The sub had jammed itself into the crack. They were stuck.
What saved them from a watery grave was the glassy nature of the brand-new lava above their heads. They were able to bang back and forth against it for over an hour to create more space, little by little, that allowed them finally to back out of the jam. When they came up, shards of the glassy lava were embedded in Alvin’s side. They got some rock samples—and lived to tell the tale.
NEAR CALAMITIES NOTWITHSTANDING, Project FAMOUS was a huge success. The Americans made 17 dives in Alvin. The French made 27 dives in Archimède and Cyana. The whole project represented an important affirmation of the role submersibles could play in the deep ocean. They made it possible for us field geologists to get down and dirty, walking the ocean’s terrain, so to speak.
The seafloor was spreading; we could see it. We went down to the boundary of creation, into the womb of Earth, and we documented the process taking place along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. It was the final nail in the coffin for those who doubted plate tectonics. We could now use thousands of photos, rock samples, and our own observations to confirm the plate tectonics theory. The skeptics could no longer sneer, and Alvin was saved from paper clip ignominy.
My first few years of scientific research had spanned 180 million years, from the opening of the Atlantic in the Gulf of Maine to the expansion of the ocean floor today in the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. With my Ph.D. and the Project FAMOUS research, I had cut my teeth as a scientist. What a great first bite! It was certainly an unexpected start to the scientific career of an ocean geologist from Kansas.