Inner floor of the Rift Valley: first submersible study

THE Rift Valley of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge1, within which lies a segment of the accreting plate boundary between Africa and North America, is well defined between 36° 40′N and 36° 55′ N. It is about 30 km wide and 1.5 km deep in that area (Fig. 1). This small portion of the rift, WSW of the Azores, was chosen as the primary target of the French–American Mid-Oceanic Undersea Survey (FAMOUS) programme, and many surface ship studies have been conducted already. We report here preliminary results of seven dives into the deepest part of the Rift Valley that were made by the bathyscaphe Archimede during the summer of 1973.