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Foam Meets Sphere

During the recent upgrade of the submersible Alvin, Bob McCabe (left) and Rod Catanach (center) carefully lowered a custom-built piece of syntactic foam onto the sub’s personnel sphere while Alvin Expedition Leader Bruce Strickrott (right) guided a vertical tie rod through a hole in the foam to hold the block in place. Each piece of foam had to be individually shaped and finished, and required many hours of work to ensure that it was ready to buoy the sub.(Photo by Tom Kleindinst, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)