Alvin being transported to a dive site

Alvin's unmatched contributions to ocean science are the focus of this segment. We go on a typical Alvin science dive, accompanying a biologist as the WHOI pilot takes the sub down 8,000 feet into the pitch darkness of the Galapagos Rift, to collect samples. It was here in 1977 that people first saw, from the Alvin, a kind of life that we had never known existed on the planet — colonies of giant clams, tube worms, fish and crabs living not on sunlight but on bacteria that consume the gases dissolved in water gushing from warm, undersea volcanic water vents.

In its thirty-year history, Alvin was the essential tool that allowed scientists to make countless key contributions to our understanding of the oceans.