Karen's Daily Blog

Yesterday was my Mom’s birthday.  She’s 71, and a woman of many talents, who’s an amazing nurse, a prize-winning golfer, a star in the kitchen, and an ace at the claw machine. The claw machines – the good ones, the old ones -- are found in the arcade on the boardwalk in Ocean City, not far from the University of Delaware College of Marine & Earth Studies. They will take your dime, drop their claw, and pick up some little prizes. You may not care what they pick up, but if you do, put your own claw to good use and grab my mom. She’s so talented she can get the prize you want for you with her carefully-honed claw machine skills.

Bruce Strickrott and Mark Spear could give Mom a lesson. I’m quite sure they could pick up everything she could pick up with the claw machine claws  -- and the elusive, slippery lucky pen, too. These guys make their living using Alvin’s manipulators to do the hard work of science. While working under extreme pressure -- not just the ocean pressure, but pressures of time, energy, vision, and the demands of needy scientists -- they choose rock samples, lift up slick clams, execute on-the-spot science experiments (who can forget the 2004 Extreme Egg Experiment, in which an egg was boiled in a vent’s flow), use needle-thin probes to gather water and take temperatures, and much more.

Alvin's manipulator arm.

It’s a challenge, to say the least. Korey Verhein, a Pilot-in-Training (PIT), talked to me about the difficulty of learning to use the manipulators while learning to pilot the sub at the same time. There’s a spare manipulator on deck with which PITs can practice, but using that is not the same as doing actual science work at the vents.

Recently one of the $200,000 titanium manipulators -- the port-side claw -- came off the sub during an undersea operation for the Ocean Drilling Program. The manipulators are on bolts designed to pull free in such a situation.

Why didn’t pilot Sean Kelley just pick the arm up with the other arm? Two reasons: one, because they didn’t know what the condition of things on the outside of the sub were; second, because the wind was whipping up at the surface, and the sub needed to go up. So, after using the exterior cameras to photograph the fallen arm, Sean dropped weights and the sub ascended. The first order of the day the next dive was to go down and pick it up with the starboard arm.

I asked Bruce Strickrott what was the hardest thing he ever had to do with a manipulator claw. Could you take the lid off a soda bottle? “Probably.” Flip a pop top? “No way.” Deal cards? “You’d probably tear them.” Hold a pen and write your name (or Alvin’s name)? “That’s a good one!”

Bruce said the hardest thing was to pick clams up. “They get crushed because there’s no ‘feedback’ in the arm.” So pilots can’t tell how tightly the claw is holding it, and clams get crushed.

 

Bruce talks about watching an elephant at the San Diego Zoo use her trunk to peel and eat bark off a stick. He’d like to see a manipulator that combined the strenth of Alvin’s claw with the deftness of the trunk. “She had infinite degrees of freedom. If you could design a manipulator for a sub that could move in all those ways. . .”

“You would have to have a material that you could energize electrically,” says Korey, and Bruce adds that it would be like a manmade muscle. Some day!

Just how good are the Alvin pilots with the tools they have now? Two years ago, Bruce Strickrott was challenged by a scientist who spotted a fish he knew hadn’t yet been observed at the vents near Easter Island. He never dreamed Bruce could get hold of the fish, but he underestimated Bruce, who nabbed the specimen with the Slurper, usually used to gather water samples. His reward? The scientist had the ugly-looking hagfish named officially after Bruce: Eptatetretue strickrotti, or Strickrott’s hagfish.

The hagfish is the most recent namesake of an Alvin pilot. Consider the tiny ctenophore named for former pilot Dudley Foster, or the mussel named for Paul Tibbetts. Discoveries of new vent organisms are literally in the hands of pilots, such as former pilot Anthony Tarantino, now a member of the Deep Submergence Lab at WHOI, who was at the controls of the manipulator when the first Yeti crab was captured.

By the way, did you know Alvin had a pair of boxing gloves to wear over the manipulator claws in the hangar at night? But Alvin’s not the only one aboard Atlantis with boxing gloves. Check out today’s photo journal to see who else knows how to give 'em the old one-two.

Today's Extreme Blogger:
Jamie Botelho

Hi All! This is Jamie Botelho the research assistant from the Caron lab. You may remember me from the Call to the Deep. It was super fun to talk to you all and answer some really great questions. I was lucky enough to be an observer on Dive 4475 yesterday and let me tell you, it was AMAZING!

On Sunday night Craig Cary came to ask me if I’d like to dive the next morning. Of course I did! That night I was so excited that I got absolutely zero sleep. It was exactly like the feeling you had when you were a kid the night before your first time to Disneyland. Lying in bed, I couldn’t stop thinking about what I might see and how much fun I knew I would have.
Though the dive was originally planned for Monday, we had some high winds so it was postponed. After two and a half long days of anticipation, we finally got the OK from the Alvin group to dive on Wednesday when Julie Smith and I went down with Expedition Leader and pilot, Bruce Strickrott. That morning as we took off our shoes and climbed down into the submarine, I was all smiles. Thankfully I have never been claustrophobic and didn’t have any second thoughts about sharing the 7-foot across titanium sphere with two other people. At 5’2” I actually had more room in my corner of the sub than most and it turned out to be quite cozy. After we began to descend and the air bubbles gave way to bright blue water in our portholes, Bruce turned up the volume on some of his instruments and informed us we had company. We could hear pilot whales! I later found out from the rest of the crew and scientists onboard the Atlantis that the whales were breaching all around the ship—apparently it was quite a sight.

Jamie inside the Alvin.

The blue gave way to black at around 300 feet and we watched the bioluminescent organisms give off little spatters of light as they flew by our windows.  While waiting to get to the bottom, Julie and I were surveying our new surroundings. We had lots of questions about how the sub and its instruments worked. In particular we wanted to know why one digital display kept counting down numbers at a seemingly steady pace. Bruce challenged us to figure out why for ourselves and gave us one hint: watch to see what happens when it reaches 0 each time. We watched for a minute and saw that after it counted all the way down, it restarted at 360. “And what is the significance of 360?” Bruce asked. It’s a full circle in degrees…  and then it clicked—it’s our heading! We were spinning down the water column. Because of the nature of the way water drags around the outside of the submarine and because the weight inside is not completely balanced, the submarine turns as it falls through the water.

Jamie after the trip.

As we got closer to the bottom, we looked outside our portholes to try to see the approaching ground beneath us. Once there, we stayed for close to six hours, but it went by so fast because there was so much to see and do. I nearly forgot to eat my lunch! Since this was our last dive at 9ºN, we had a “cleanup” dive where we collected the last of our samples and any instruments we had left down there. We did a sweep from Biovent in the north to marker 28 in the south stopping at East Wall, Tica, and P Vent along the way. The vents were beautiful and quite amazing to see as they poured out black smoke.  Bruce was an excellent pilot and flew through the tasks quicker than I could write them down. We collected protist traps, replaced a temperature probe, and collected water, tubes worms, part of a sulfide chimney and a large slab of basalt rock. At one point, we looked out our portholes and only saw large rock walls on either side of us. Bruce told us we were “flying” through a canyon about the size of the Alvin hanger. (It holds the Alvin and leaves maybe a foot or two on either side.) The trip felt very surreal, like at any moment someone would open the hatch and yell “Just kidding! It was all a trick,” or that I would wake up from an unbelievable dream. As we started the ascent toward home, all I could think of was how incredible and unforgettable the whole experience was.

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