ANONYMOUS IS A WOMAN. DISCOVERING THE DEEP-SEA HYDROTHERMAL VENTS IN THE GALAPAGOS

Many major scientific discoveries are attributed to one or two people. In marine science, the list of contributors is usually larger. There is the idea, the proposal, data collection, data analysis, and paper writing. That could be the same person, but more likely, it was a team of people, and people have different memories of the same discovery.

One of the most remarkable scientific discoveries of the twentieth century was finding the first hydrothermal vent communities near the Galapagos spreading center in 1977. Jack Corliss and Robert Ballard both claim to have discovered the vent communities. Dick von Herzen and Jerry van Andel and many others were aboard the R.V. Knorr which was accompanying R.V. Lulu, mother ship to the submersible Alvin. A report on the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution website says, “Ballard, along with a team of thirty marine geologists, geochemists, and geophysicists, had found the world’s first known active hydrothermal vent.”

The ship was headed to a spot in the Pacific Ocean roughly 640 km W of Ecuador and 330 km NE of the Galapagos Islands. The previous year Kathleen Crane, a graduate student at Scripps Institution of Oceanography (SIO), searching for hydrothermal vents using Scripps Deep Tow instrument, had left an acoustic beacon to mark a spot where there was a temperature anomaly, water slightly warmer (0.1^oC) than the sounding deep sea. Accompanying the anomaly, pictures showed dead clam shells. She named the location, “Clambake”

She was searching the area because a 1974 paper by Detrick, Williams, Mudie and Sclater, identified “temperature measurements made less than 10m from the bottom revealed local temperature anomalies of several hundredths ^oC which may have been caused by hydrothermal activity.” It was this paper that led Corliss and Dymond to propose submersible exploration of the area. Ballard, who had experience with submersible diving from his work during Project FAMOUS in the Atlantic and could operate the Woods Hole’s deep towed camera system ANGUS, was invited to participate.

Maybe the person who makes the most noise gets the credit, and in 1977, it wasn’t Kathleen Crane, a young female graduate student at SIO. Her contribution is mentioned on her Wikipedia page, but other than that, her find is rarely recognized. For this discovery, she might as well be anonymous.