Diving into Uncharted Waters

Marine Lab Director Cindy Van Dover Literally Wrote the Book on Hydrothermal Vents

By Tim Lucas

A mile and a half beneath the Pacific Ocean, a new world opened up for Cindy Van Dover.

It was 1985, and Van Dover, then just months shy of earning her master’s degree in theoretical ecology at UCLA, was making her first dive in the submersible research vessel Alvin. As the pilot guided the Volkswagen-sized sub into the inky depths of the Galapagos Rift, 2,450 meters below the surface, Van Dover was stunned by what she saw.

Outside her view port, Alvin’s headlights illuminated dense clumps of slender, sleeve-like white tubes rising up from the sea floor with blood-red plumes poking out of their tips like giant lipsticks. Ghostly white crabs and eel-like fish darted between the clumps. Smoke billowed out of lopsided, chimney-like rock formations, and jets of superheated water bubbled up through cracks in the sea floor.

It was the famed Rose Garden hydrothermal vent, an otherworldly sea-floor oasis discovered in 1977 in the waters near the Galapagos Islands, and so named because some scientists thought its tubeworms resembled clusters of long-stemmed roses.

“I remember thinking how extraordinary it was to be there, in this place at the bottom of the sea where humans weren’t supposed to be, and to look out my view port and see a sunless environment filled with animals that were living without input from photosynthesis,” says Van Dover, 52, an internationally respected deep-sea biologist who joined the Nicholas School faculty last August as director of the Duke University Marine Lab. Van Dover, professor of marine biology, also is chair of the school’s Division of Coastal Systems Science and Policy.

“It was amazing, like nothing I had ever experienced before,” she says. “My heart was pounding and my adrenaline was pumping. I was hooked.”

She’s been diving—figuratively and literally—into uncharted waters ever since. Drawn by the alien beauty of the vent ecosystems and by the scientific puzzles they pose, Van Dover has made more than 100 dives in Alvin and other submersibles. She’s explored nearly every known vent site in the world, once diving as deep as 4,000 meters in a Russian sub.

In 1990 she became the only PhD scientist and only woman ever to complete the rigorous training necessary to be an Alvin pilot. “It didn't seem like such a big leap to me,” she says. “If you’re an ecologist, you want to be in the environment you study. On a research cruise, no one spends more time undersea than the sub’s pilots. So to be the best scientist I could be, I realized I had to become a pilot.”

Since then, she’s been pilot-incommand on 48 dives.

Van Dover’s plied new waters as a researcher, too.

In 1989, the same year she earned her PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology/Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Joint Program in Biological Oceanography, she published a paper in the prestigious journal Nature that described a novel photoreceptor in a species of blind shrimp found at deep sea hydrothermal vents. That paper, part of a series of papers by Van Dover now considered seminal in the field, led to the discovery and characterization of a geothermal source of light at the vents.

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