October 21, 2001

Check out these videos and photos, which have been transmitted
to the University of Delaware from the R/V Atlantis.

These are two of the vent crabs Alvin collected and brought to the surface. They are still alive in a tray of seawater in one of the labs on the ship.

Teachers Rob Adams and Kathy Griffin and their students at Polytech High School in Woodside, Delaware, proposed an experiment for us to try on Alvin. The students asked what would happen to an egg if it went down with Alvin on one of the dives. The scientists on board were very interested in this experiment, and about half the scientists thought it would stay the same, and the other half thought that the egg would break open. The egg was taped to the outside of Alvin and sent down. This is a picture of the egg after the dive, and as you can see, the egg remained in one piece!

Julie Robidart loads a bag of styrofoam cups onto Alvin. The cups will shrink as the sub dives to the bottom of the sea, due to the great pressure.

Here is the before (right) and after (left) of a styrofoam cup after it has gone diving to the depths with Alvin.

Using this instrument — the MegaBACE 1000 DNA sequencer — the Extreme 2001 scientists achieved the first DNA sequencing that has ever been done at sea!