Monitoring teams are busy at work making sure systems are functioning, logging activities, documenting each precious minute using video and computer applications. Teachers are becoming experts at video controls, logging and frame grabbing responsibilities during the long dives. The control room is alive with activity, intense concentration and sometimes tension, each player giving their best to make for a successful dive. Canada Touched by drama Science is much more often hard work than drama. I want you.
Scientific drama can often be unwelcome.
In fact it usually is. Research into subsea vents seems to have more than its fair share of such drama. This must be because it is so challenging. Here one is battling not just the wind and the weather traditional fare for sailors, but also the challenges of very high pressure, hot sulfurous water, limited visibility, and, perhaps most difficult, the problem of carrying out experiments requiring the ordinary human skills of grasping, tilting, tieing, plugging, digging etc. without the presence of an ordinary human at the scene. Instead, there is a marvellous, but nonetheless clumsy, robot watched over by tens of tense, sweating scientists and engineers over 2000 metres above it, eyes glued to the video screens which portray all too vividly how distant is the dream of a robot as dextrous as mankind.