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Navy officials posing with the hydrogen bomb recovered using DSV Alvin.

Navy officials posing with the hydrogen bomb recovered using DSV Alvin.
Navy officials posing with the hydrogen bomb recovered using DSV Alvin.
Navy officials posing with the hydrogen bomb recovered using DSV Alvin.
Navy officials posing with the hydrogen bomb recovered using DSV Alvin.
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Navy officials posing with the hydrogen bomb recovered using DSV Alvin.
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01/01/1966
media/alvin/alvin_hbomb_1.jpg
Date is approximate.
Image of the Day caption: (this image is the inset within a larger image of Alvin)
Forty one years ago this week, Alvin pilots Bill Rainnie and Marvin McCamis located an unexploded hydrogen bomb that had accidentally been dropped into the Mediterranean Sea two months earlier by a U.S. Air Force B-52. It took a month of searching with Alvin (foreground), Navy ships, and the Navy sub Aluminaut--and another month of trying to hook and raise the bomb--before officials (inset) from the U.S. Navy and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) could pose with it on the deck of the U.S.S. Petrel. Rainnie and McCamis received a Meritorious Service Award from the Secretary of the Navy for their efforts.
Caption from Oceanus magazine, Vol. 51, No. 1, pg. 3 timeline:
1966: The U.S. Navy calls in Alvin to help find a hydrogen bomb that was accidentally dropped into the Mediterranean Sea. The Alvin team finds and helps recover the bomb.
Caption from Oceanus magazine, Vol. 48, No. 3, Pg. 4, Item (2):
Throughout WHOI’s history, basic research has spawned unexpected discoveries and applications (left to right). Surprising findings about sound propagation in seawater led Al Vine to build devices to aid submariners in World War II (1). Later, Vine led efforts to build deep-submergence vehicles, including the submersible Alvin, which located a hydrogen bomb on the seafloor for the Navy in 1966 (2), and discovered hydrothermal vents sustaining chemosynthetic organisms in 1977 (3). Biologists Howard Sanders and George Hampson (4) collaborated with chemist and gas chromatography pioneer Max Blumer (5) to study persistent coastal impacts from the West Falmouth oil spill in 1969. WHOI’s expertise and technology, including the yellow deep-sea robot Sentry (6), combined to tackle difficult questions about the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010.
Photo courtesy of WHOI Archives
© Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
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