Creatures in the Sulfur Garden

IN 1977, AFTER SEVERAL years of planning and fund-raising, a team of about a dozen American geologists desperate to see “hot springs” on a midocean ridge secured time aboard the U.S. Deep Submergence Research vehicle  Alvin to explore the Galápagos Rift. The legendary Alvin is a three-person submarine 25 feet (7.6 m) long and weighing 16 tons (14,500 kg). When it is not diving for up to eight hours at depths of up to 2.8 miles (4.5 km), Alvin resides at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts. It remains one of the few manned submarines available today for scientific work in the deep sea.

Besides its scientific research mandate, Alvin was the little white sub with the red conning tower that saved the world—or, more accurately, saved face for the United States. In the mid-1960s, Alvin located a hydrogen bomb that had been lost following the crash of a U.S. Air Force B-52 off the coast of Spain. It was the first submarine to dive on the RMS Titanic, and it clearly played a big role in inspiring James Cameron to build the Deepsea Challenger that would allow his later, much deeper explorations to the bottom of the Mariana Trench. There were also a few mishaps over Alvin’s 36-year career. In 1968, it sank—fortunately without any casualties—and spent nearly a year on the bottom, one mile (1.6 km) beneath the surface. And Alvin was once attacked by a 250-pound (113 kg) swordfish, whose “sword” became wedged between the joint of two outer plates, fixing the fish to the sub like a trophy mounted backwards. Shortly after, when Alvin’s alarm system revealed that there were leaks, the sub raced to the surface. The leaks, as it turned out, were unrelated to the swordfish attack.