Students Log On as Scientists Explore Deep Ocean

John Roach
for National Geographic News

December 6, 2004

Deep in the ocean where the sun never shines, stinky clams, slippery tubeworms, ghost-white crabs, eel-like fish, and a gaggle of funky microscopic bacteria huddle around cracks in the Earth that spew scalding hot, toxic brews.

The spewing cracks are known as hydrothermal vents and the life that thrives around them fascinates the scientific community.

This month, thousands of school children are logging on to the Internet to join scientists exploring a series of hydrothermal vents on the East Pacific Rise about 1,200 miles (2,000 kilometers) west of Costa Rica. The rise is part of an underwater mountain range known as the Mid-Ocean Ridge system that snakes the globe like the stitching on a baseball.

"We call the program a virtual field trip, we want [the students] to feel like they are out here with us," said Craig Cary, a marine biologist at the University of Delaware in Lewes, who is leading the Extreme 2004: Exploring the Deep Frontier expedition.

Cary and his team embarked November 30 from Manzanillo, Mexico, on their 21-day voyage aboard the 274-foot (84-meter) research vessel Atlantis. On most days, they'll dive 1 mile (0.6 kilometer) down to the vents in the submersible Alvin.

This is the sixth year in a row Cary has led an expedition to the East Pacific Rise, the fourth involving interaction with middle and high school students who follow along via the Internet and can ask the research team questions and propose experiments.

"It provides a fantastic real-life connection to science for my students," Lana Crumrine, a science teacher at Klamath High School in Klamath Falls, Oregon, said. Crumrine's students are part of the estimated 52,000 from more than 750 participating schools.

"So often students sit in science class and hear about science as something someone did or discovered a long time ago and this program allows students to realize science is dynamic, it's current, and there are still things about our world we don't know," she added.

Biocomplexity

Of great interest to the scientists this year is the complex life of the microorganisms living at the hydrothermal vent sites. The environment is unlike anything else on the planet. Within the length of the human arm, temperatures range from near freezing to boiling.

"We really do not understand how a community of bacteria is mediated by its local environment, especially one that is changing so rapidly as we see in these diffuse flow vent sites," Cary said. "The chemistry is very complicated and very difficult to measure."

Working together, chemists and biologists hope to tease out the details that make life in such an environment possible—knowledge that could lead to new medicines, materials such as crystals, and clues about where to look for life on another planet.

The scientific collaboration is a major component to the "biocomplexity" theme of the 2004 expedition. Biocomplexity is the complex interplay between living organisms and their environment, which requires scientists from different disciplines to work together to understand.

Historically, Cary said, scientists never worked with scientists outside their own discipline, so a marine biologist would never work with a geochemist.

"It has been extremely challenging in that we all had to learn new languages but in the end the results are very exciting because we all are now able to look at the complex environmental problems with a new set of eyes and it is amazing what you see," Cary said.

Student Participation

Cary's interest in opening his annual expeditions up to students via the Internet evolved from the feeling that teachers were losing their creative freedom in the classroom as they were forced to comply with national standards.

The program started with just eight schools in 1999, which proved so successful it was opened to schools across the U.S. in 2000. This year students in almost every U.S. state, Washington D.C., Guam, Puerto Rico as well as in Canada, Mexico, Iran, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and Uzbekistan are participating.

"It has just taken off beyond my wildest dreams," Cary said. "Kids all over the world get a chance to experience real field science as it is happening. They see us succeed and fail. They see the new discoveries right as we do."

Julie Steen is a science teacher at Mickelson Middle School in Brookings, South Dakota. She is participating in the program for the opportunity it provides her students to interact with the ocean.

"We are landlocked in South Dakota," she said. "The vast majority of my students have only seen an ocean via TV, educational programs, or movies."

Steen has used the program to teach her students about scientific tools and the limits of those tools in an environment such as the deep ocean. On Friday, her students will participate in a live phone conversation with the scientists in the ocean.

Crumrine, the Klamath Falls science teacher, spent much of the fall teaching her students about plate tectonics and the formation of ocean basins. "Seeing footage of scientists visiting areas of active tectonics is a real affirmation for the students," she said.

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