Interviews: Co-Chief Scientist Tim Shank

Tim climbs aboard RV Atlantis in Puerto Ayora, Santa Cruz Island for his first cruise as Co-Chief Scientist.

Question:
Do you remember your first dive in Alvin?

Tim:
You never forget your first dive. December 15, 1993. With Dan Fornari and Pat Hickey. Dive No. 2683. You don’t forget.

	Tim enters Alvin for the first dive to the Galapágos Rift in 12 years.

Question:
Where did you dive?

Tim:
9° 50’N on the East Pacific Rise. In 1991, just before I signed on as a graduate student, Rich Lutz, Dan Fornari, and Rachel Haymon had found that volcanic activity at the 9° 50’N vent site had just wiped out a thriving community of vent animals. It was the undersea equivalent of studying what happened after Mount St. Helens erupted and wiped out the landscape around it. Here was a rare opportunity to start at the very beginning, when there was virtually no life left, and see what would happen and how it would happen.

Question:
What was the plan for studying this area?

Tim:
We set aside an area to study—1 1/2 kilometers long by 100 meters wide. With Alvin, we put out 200 markers, like guideposts, throughout the area, so we could tell where we were each time we returned in Alvin, and we took lots and lots of video of the area. My first assignment for Lutz, my graduate advisor, was to study those videos. He said, “You need to know this area of seafloor like the back of your hand.” I watched those videos over and over and over again. It was like the movie “Groundhog Day.” Eventually, I knew where every single rock was in that area. I studied that area for a year and a half before I ever saw it in person on my first dive in Alvin.

Question:
What did the site look like in 1991 right after the eruption?

Tim:
Utter devastation. All the animals were dead. Some were obliterated. Photographs showed only white bacterial debris covering the seafloor. It was like a snowscape. But by 1992, the video showed that a small, accordion-shaped tubeworm called Tevnia jerichonana had returned to colonize about 17 different sites at 9°N. In 1993 when I dived, we didn’t know what we would find. Maybe these sites were all dead. Maybe they were the same as the year before. Maybe other animals might have come in.

Question:
OK, OK, we can’t stand it anymore. What did you see on your first dive?

Tim:
So I went down. Remember, I had studied this area intensely for a year and a half. It was like seeing old photos of a place that you heard about as a kid, and then growing up and finally getting to see it in real life. And it was more than I could ever have hoped for. Just about every one of those 17 little areas of Tevnia were covered with much larger tubeworms, Riftia pachyptila. The areas had just blossomed into bright, white and red, pristine bouquets of tubeworms. Boom. It was so dramatic. I was so excited. I kept on saying things like, “Wow, see that spot. It was this way before, and now it’s like this.” Meanwhile, Dan, a geologist, was reporting on all the rock formations, and the scientists on the surface ship were asking, “What about the biology? What about the biology?” And Dan said, almost incidentally, “The biology? Oh, it’s packed with animals.”

Question:
Your specialty is studying the animals, right?

Tim:
We have been presented with a completely new ecosystem on our planet. We are trying to figure out how that ecosystem works, and how all the species in it interact with each other. All the animals are down there on the tabletop of the seafloor—sometimes piled up together like people in a tenement, five to a bedroom. And there’s no way we have seen everything there is to see. For scientists, hydrothermal vents are like a dreamland, with only one problem—it’s a mile and a half under water and you can’t touch your animals. Inaccessibility is the cruel joke God plays on us.

	Tim checks the placement and accessibility of equipment in Alvin’s basket before he makes a dive.

Question:
So a dive in Alvin is not exactly like a typical day in the office.

Tim:
When you’re on the seafloor, you’re working. You’re funded by the American public and you have a mission to do. So I’d say 90 percent of me is focused on that mission.

But perhaps 10 percent of me is aware that everything I’m seeing has some element of mystery and discovery to it. You’re looking at an animal or an animal community that you know so little about and that you want to know so much about. Life is still a fundamental mystery. There’s still something divine about studying life that makes it fascinating and compelling to me. People always ask me what it’s like to be at the bottom of the ocean. It’s like trying to describe a beautiful sunset to someone. You can’t really do it with words. Even if two people are sitting next to each other, watching the same sunset, it’s very personal, and each person experiences it in his or her own way.

QUESTION:
How many times have you dived in Alvin?

Tim:
I’ve had about 35 dives in Alvin, to many different mid-ocean ridges in different oceans. You probably can count the number of people who have done that on the fingers of two hands. So I am very fortunate. But until today (May 26, 2002) I’ve never dived on the Galápagos Rift, where this whole line of research began.