What is Alvin?
Alvin is a Deep Submergence Vehicle (DSV), the first of its class, designed to explore the ocean floor for oceanography. Modern nuclear submarines, like the American Seawolf class, have a crush depth of 730 m (2400 ft), while Alvin has a crush depth of 4000 m (15,000 ft). Alvin was constructed at General Mills’ Electronics Group and commissioned on June 5, 1964. Weighing in at 16 tons, Alvin is owned by the United States Navy and operated by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. Throughout its 40-plus years of oceanography service, Alvin has received a complete overhaul on several occasions. Alvin was built to replace bathyscaphes and other, less maneuverable oceanography vehicles. One of its primary structural materials is syntactic foam, a composite material consisting of glass microspheres embedded in a matrix of epoxy resin. Syntactic foam is buoyant, yet it can withstand extreme pressures. At its maximum depth, the pressure on Alvin is equiv
