The Alvin scientists and crew just finished swimming around in the middle of the Pacific Ocean to look at deep sea vents on the ocean floor of the East Pacific Rise spreading center and goof around, as you can see in the picture at right. This isn't just any old research cruise, though. It's a SEAS: Student Experiment at Sea cruise, complete with a grade school teacher onboard, who will no doubt encourage her students to pursue a life of stress and poverty as research oceanographers. The mission of the Alvin cruise was to study the site of fresh lava and vent communities on the ridge axis of the East Pacific Rise that were found by another group of scientists in May 2006. This area of study is one of the focus areas of the Ridge2000 program, a decade-long program designed to bring scientists from many different disciplines, from biology to seismology, to collectively study a small geographic area on a fast-spreading ridge. You can read the online cruise log on the SEAS website.