Cindy Lee Van Dover holds membership in a most exclusive boy’s club: Of the 42 gearheads, engineers, and former Navy commanders who have piloted the submersible Alvin—the stubby, cramped, three-crew midget research sub __that discovered the Titanic—she is the first and only woman. “The hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life,” she says, “was to become an Alvin pilot.”
It’s a feat __that takes months of training, learning the arcane language of check valves, autoclaves, ballast systems, oxygen monitors, electrical systems, and a Rube-Goldberg system of mechanical levers and knobs. And you have to be able to execute it with the concentration of a Space Shuttle pilot, 2 miles deep. In fact, there are fewer Alvin pilots than Shuttle pilots (135).
Since Van Dover’s first gender-breaking piloted dive in 1990, she has descended to the ocean floor 93 times inside the 32-foot-long three-person sub. During that time, she has discovered dozens of exotic species living off hydrothermal vents, which is now her specialty. She studies their reproductive habits, their food webs, and even invented a now widely used vacuum technology to capture and further study the creatures.
Which seems just about right for someone who spent her childhood summers scrambling along the beach, flipping over horseshoe crabs and inspecting snail eggs. Most kids her age just wished “for a train set,” she says. “I just wished to see these animals living on the seafloor.”
She went on to earn a Ph.D. in biological oceanography in 1989, and that same year landed a spot on an Alvin mission exploring vents. From that first dive, she wanted to get behind the controls. Back then, most pilots had mechanical backgrounds from long Naval careers. “I was just a scientist, and a biologist at that,” she says. “I had to learn a whole new vocabulary.”
After each day of working on board one of her research ships, she’d retreat to her cabin to memorize thick manuals and schematics, including, “this one diagram that starts from the big batteries all the way to making one little finger move on the manipulator,” she says. Nine months later she had her certification, one that allowed her a coveted front-row seat to underwater exploration. Most biologists like her can wait up to three years to get a research project written, funded, and green-lit for a seat on Alvin. But a pilot can dive nearly every other day. “It was quite a strategic move on her part and one that took a lot of guts” says Dan Fornari, a marine geologist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute and a colleague of 30 years.
These days, Van Dover’s exploring is conducted at a desk dominated by two large computer screens. There she organizes expeditions and writes recommendations for promising students in her eponymous lab at the Duke University Marine Laboratory, where she became the first female director in 2006. But she’ll always remember her last dive.
A mile underwater in the Gulf of Mexico, she was helping test Alvin after a scheduled overhaul, when the carbon-dioxide scrubber failed. Oxygen levels plunged. She and her crew members had to drop ballast weights, strap on oxygen masks, fire the thrusters, and ascend. But she never panicked. “I know that submarine so well,” she says. “I knew we’d get back up.”
Despite being a few dives shy of a century (that coveted 100 mark) that will likely be her last.
“It was such a memorable one,” she says. “I might just leave it at that.”
Depth Gauge
1982 Part of the first expedition to explore hydrothermal vents in the East Pacific Rise, a line running from Antarctica to the Gulf of California where tectonic plates are pulling apart
1990 First (and only) female Alvin pilot
1993 Helped explore and characterize Lucky Strike, one of the largest-known and most biologically unique hydrothermal-vent areas
2006 First female director of the Duke University Marine Laboratory
2015 Co-developed a first of its kind robotic sub that can vacuum up huge volumes of plankton to study
Read about how other ocean explorers are solving the planet’s mysteries in the rest of our Deep Sea Six feature from the January/February 2017 issue of Popular Science.