Brian Wrightsman (left), biology and Earth science teacher at North Central High School in Farmersburg, Indiana, consults with Anthony Rathburn, Indiana State University associate professor of geology, after Wrightman’s dive to the seafloor in the deep submersible Alvin.
Brian Wrightsman knows it pays to keep in touch with your professors after graduation. Maintaining contact with his geology professor earned him a chance for a great adventure: a journey to the bottom of the sea near Costa Rica to explore organisms living around methane seeps. “To see the diversity of life in a place where neither the Sun nor humans have ever been before was a gratifying experience,” he says of his trip, which took place in February and March.
Wrightsman, 27, a biology and Earth science teacher at North Central High School in Farmersburg, Indiana, majored in geology and science education at Indiana State University (ISU). He worked as a student researcher in an independent laboratory conducting paleoceanographic research, supervised by Anthony Rathburn, ISU associate professor of geology and paleontologist. Wrightsman also joined scientists doing field work, “including work off of the coasts of Alaska and California” focusing “primarily on benthic foraminifera—single-celled protists that dwell on the seafloor—and their use in paleoclimatic reconstruction,” he explains.
After graduating in 2007, he stayed connected with Rathburn, who offered him opportunities to continue doing research. “I was invited [last year] to accompany Dr. Rathburn to Antarctica, but was unable to, so when the Costa Rica trip came up, he offered me a spot.” Wrightsman says he eagerly accepted the offer to join the National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded expedition because it provided “one more opportunity to get my students excited about science through my experiences.” He also viewed the trip as “a great learning experience as well as a networking opportunity, being that there were 20 other scientists on the ship from different fields of study and regions, including Cal Tech, Australian National University, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, Indiana State, and Temple University.”
Before accepting Rathburn’s offer, Wrightsman wrote a proposal for the school board describing how his experiences during his one-month leave of absence would benefit his students, stressing the importance of the information he would bring back to the classroom. Though the board approved his proposal, he was granted leave without pay.
Fortunately, Rathburn helped him obtain an NSF Research Experiences for Teachers grant. The funds covered his salary for the month off, as well as for two months this summer, allowing Wrightsman to conduct independent research on some samples collected from the seafloor and develop educational tools based on the expedition. The grant also provided $1,000 for him to set up a marine aquarium in his classroom; the remainder of the funds will finance his travel to the American Geophysical Union’s December conference in San Francisco, where he will present his work to scientists.
Down in the Deep
In his blog at http://blogs.indstate.edu/~wpmu/brian, Wrightsman describes life and work aboard the research vessel Atlantis and inside the deep submersible Alvin, the same submarine used to locate the Titanic. An excerpt reveals the agony and the ecstasy of the research: “Hopefully, some good research can come from looking at this particular species found attached to the tube worms, which are sometimes up to 60 cm long! This gets a little tedious, as you constantly have to adjust the magnification of the microscope because the tube worms 1. are not flat, and 2. are normally shaped in some pretty cool twisty ways.”
He admits his least favorite aspect of the expedition “would definitely be the long hours. The submarine was down [underwater collecting sediment samples] during the day, so night was when most of the work actually got done. We were often up very late, covered in mud from the bottom of the ocean that we had been processing from tube cores taken earlier in the evening.” Tube cores are the two-foot-long acrylic tubes Alvin’s robotic arms push into the sediment to extract samples, called cores. “A foot of core can represent several thousand years of information,” he explains, making the hard work to obtain them worthwhile.
He says his “favorite activities during the trip could be narrowed down to my experiences down in the deep submersible Alvin and being the first person, ever, [to] make a phone call from the sub. The call was made to a small group of [current and former North Central High School] students, who were able to ask me questions while I was 1,000 meters below sea level in a very small submarine” in which “only three people can fit.”
Back in the Classroom
“I think that my passion and firsthand knowledge and experience for science alone is a major benefit for my students,” Wrightsman concludes. “They often stop me and say something like ‘Wow, Mr. Wrightsman, you really like this stuff’—and it’s true.”
In his Earth science classes, he teaches a section on oceanography, and he believes “the knowledge…gained during my experiences has made teaching this information very successful for my students. I am able to show them samples I’ve collected; we pick through sediment from the seafloor and examine preserved specimens I collected. I also have taken a lot of pictures that will act as good visual aids during my lessons.”