Project FAMOUS

It took place between 1971 and 1974, with a multi-national team of scientists concentrating numerous underwater surveys on an area of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge about 700 kilometers (380 nautical miles) west of the Azores.

The project succeeded in defining the main mechanisms of creation of the median rift valley on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, and in locating and mapping the zone of oceanic crustal accretion.

The Project FAMOUS study area was located on a section of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge about 700 kilometers (380 nautical miles) west of the Azores (Sao Miguel) at 36° 50’ north latitude.

[2] A significant obstacle in marine surveys was the use of echo sounders with a wide transmit beam, which smeared-out details of the sea floor features.

The crustal accretion or creation process was thought to take place over a few kilometers width of sea floor,[4][5][6] which was below the resolution of ship echo sounders.

[19] With Project FAMOUS located on the ridge in more clement latitudes around 37° N, a coordinated multi-national, multi-ship series of more than twenty expeditions took place over four years, between 1971 and 1974.

The unique operational features of Project FAMOUS included the use of newly developed narrow-beam and multibeam echo sounders along with deeply-towed instruments and manned submersibles to achieve a new, higher level of resolution of a spreading center.

Besides the approach using instruments with increasing detailed resolution, the submersible divers were trained to recognize the volcanic terrain they could encounter through prior field exercises undertaken in Iceland and Hawaii.

[20] The demonstration of the viability of sea floor observations by submersibles made possible the subsequent discoveries of hydrothermal vents at the Galapagos spreading center[22] and on the East Pacific Rise at 21° N.[23] The project succeeded in defining the morphology and structure of the spreading center or median rift valley along with locating the zone of crustal accretion[6] in the median valley floor.

the near-bottom and on-bottom observations find that the narrow shear zones are in fact at right angles to the rift valley trend as would be required by plate tectonics.