Fifty years ago, the deep sea vehicle Alvin made its first free dive, submerging to 35 feet below the waves. Since then, DSV Alvin has been repeatedly overhauled and upgraded, keeping pace with current technology in countless dives and endless missions carrying humans into the deep blue sea.
While the Chinese are busy scouting the best under-sea sites to pillage for precious metals, America's venerable oceanic exploration sub, the newly-renovated DSV Alvin, continues to uncover scores of deep sea life forms that science has never even seen. Here are just a few of the more exotic animals Alvin has come…
Barely a week since successfully completing sea trials after a three year hiatus, the venerable research sub Alvin is already earning back the $42 million in hardware upgrades and engineering retrofits it's received—showing off its spacious new three-crew cabin with a quick dive to the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico.…
Over the course of 4,400 dives, Alvin has done just about everything. Its recovered lost nukes, explored the ruins of the HMS Titanic, and upturned our understanding of the deep sea with the discovery of hydrothermal vents bustling with unimaginable forms of life. But after 48 years of service, the venerable ROV is…
After sinking, the RMS Titanic lay undisturbed beneath 12,000 feet of freezing North Atlantic water for years, but in 1985 its watery tomb was finally breached by another marquee vessel—the crown prince of HOVs.
This is Alvin, a famous US Navy deep sea submarine. It survived the extreme conditions of deep sea exploration looking for lost hydrogen bombs, surveying the Titanic, and exploring a hydrothermal vent for the first time in history.
The NY Times has a piece today about the monumental task of forging a pressure hull out of raw titanium to be used in the replacement for the legendary Alvin, the Navy's only currently operational deep-sea scientific sub that first explored the wreckage of the Titanic. Where Alvin could dive 2.4 miles down, its…
