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James
Childress inside Alvin
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But
while Childress uses words like "successful" and "effective"
to describe Alvin, one word he wouldn't use is "comfortable."
Alvin is a mere eight and a half feet across, and the
pressure-resistant sphere in which the crew sits is just six
and a half feet in inside diameter. That leaves the three-person
crew pretty cramped. Moreover, since researchers would rather
allocate Alvin's limited battery power to their work,
not their comfort, the sub doesn't have any climate control.
After several hours, the temperature in the cabin reaches
that of the ocean around it. At the depths Alvin can
visit — as much as 15,000 feet below the surface —
that's just a few degrees above freezing. Researchers wear
layers of clothing and warm their hands in the excess heat
of the instrument panels to combat the cold.
Perhaps
less dire, the catering aboard Alvin is terrible,
jokes Childress. "Unlike the French, who over the years have
served warm breakfast on china plates on the Nautile"
he laughs, "Woods Hole's has never gotten the idea of putting
any decent food in there."
Short
of china plates, one way to keep the researchers safe and
comfortable while they explore the bottom of the ocean is
to keep them up here on the surface. Thanks to remotely, and
more recently autonomously, operated vehicles (ROV, AOV),
the next generation of ocean explorers may never again have
to squeeze into an Alvin-like vessel and endure long,
cold days on the seafloor with nothing to eat but peanut butter
sandwiches. AOVs can cruise unattended through the oceans
for days or weeks collecting data, while ROVs equipped with
fiber optic links can send images and data back to the surface
in real time. One advantage is that an entire team of scientists
can gather around a monitor to observe the sea life or artifacts
in question, each lending his or her own expertise.
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"The
ROV looks like a really nice thing, I'm really looking forward
to using it," says Childress, though he admits some of his
colleagues are more skeptical. Many scientists emphasize the
importance of "being there" to their research.
"There
are people who feel the human eye has certain advantages for
looking out because you can much more quickly scan and focus
and see things," he says. "Some of my colleagues who do ecology
say that you can much more easily get a map in your mind in
a submersible and they'd get really lost with an ROV. But
I've gotten really lost in submersibles, so I hate to make
a strong statement on this." 
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