Alvin's Lunches

When the research submarine Alvin sank in the Atlantic off Woods Hole, Mass., in 1968, its three crew members managed to scramble to safety. But their box lunches went to the bottom with Alvin--5,000 feet down. Those uneaten meals, it was revealed in Science last week, eventually provided researchers with valuable new information about the workings of life processes in the ocean depths.

Ten months after the accident, when the little sub was raised and drained, scientists noticed that the six bologna sandwiches, two apples and two thermoses of bouillon seemed remarkably well-preserved--even though they were soaked in sea water. Intrigued, a four-man team led by Microbiologist Holger Jannasch at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution ran tests on the lunches ranging from simple tasting to detailed lab analysis. Their conclusion: the apples were about as well-preserved as if they had been kept in a refrigerator while the rest of the food had fared far better than that.

Having eliminated various factors that might have accounted for the decay slowdown--such as a lack of oxygen or the presence of any substance with preservative qualities--the scientists decided to double-check and expand their findings by suspending marine bacteria and nutrients at even greater depths. They concluded that the rate of degradation is an average of "ten to 100 times slower in the deep sea." In the deep, they found, there seems to be "a general slowdown of life processes," probably due to the "combined effect of high pressure and low temperature." Alvin's sandwiches, for example, were under 150 atmospheres of pressure at about 39DEG F.

The Alvin-inspired findings are of more than academic interest. "One obvious implication concerns the use of the deep sea as a dumping site for organic wastes," the report says. Because of the slow degradation of organic materials, anything dumped on the ocean floor may be effectively removed from the natural recycling process, and whatever nutrients it contains will be lost--perhaps for as long as a century.

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