IN THE NEWS: PROFILES
DOWN UNDER
Karen Von Damm gathers knowledge from the deep to share with her students
by Suki Casanave
At 9 degrees north, 500 miles off the west coast of Mexico, the earth is erupting. It is 1991. A mile and a half down on the ocean floor, tectonic plates shift and separate. Lava gushes into crevasses. Boiling water spews forth. Blizzards of bacteria billow in milky clouds 160 feet high. Black smokers--gnarled chimneys of minerals precipitated from the hot springs--rise in 30-foot spires.
In the pitch black of the ocean deep, where the pressure is nearly two tons per square inch, water doesn't boil until it reaches 730 degrees F. But here, around the seething open vents, giant colonies of tubeworms thrive. Creatures fit for a science fiction film, their bright red bodies grow up to six feet long, feeding on minerals and wafting from their white casings in a mass of creepy, surreal fingers.
There is no place on earth Karen Von Damm would rather be than here, among the tubeworms and black smokers of the East Pacific Rise, part of the mid-ocean ridge that twists for 40,000 miles along the earth's surface. The associate professor of earth sciences is a geochemist--and world expert on black smokers. She is in search of answers to what she calls "the big question": What controls the chemistry of sea water?
Von Damm has returned to 9 degrees north five times since the 1991 eruption. Each time, she works with a national team of scientists, dropping to the ocean floor to gather samples in a titanium submersible named Alvin, built to withstand the pressure and the heat. These deep-sea explorations, which have attracted much attention, have been featured recently in National Geographic and on the PBS series "The New Explorers."
Widely respected in her field, Von Damm served as chief scientist on a 1995 ridge expedition, and she currently serves as chair of the national steering committee for the Ridge Inter-Disciplinary Global Experiments (RIDGE) program, founded in the early 1990s. The National Science Foundation initiative supports interdisciplinary research-- collaboration among biologists, chemists, geophysicists, and geologists exploring how the earth works and how new crust is created. Located at UNH for the next three years, the RIDGE program will bring $1.5 million to the university.
No matter what Von Damm is doing--collaborating with colleagues at sea, orchestrating the RIDGE program, working in her lab--she is thinking about the ocean, gathering material and experiences to share with her students. "I want them to realize that science is not all dead and done," says Von Damm, who points out that until 1977, no one had any idea that hot water was gushing from the ocean floor.
The real-life experience Von Damm brings to her teaching changes forever the way some students feel about science. "This is the first time I have been excited about a science class," reads one student's evaluation of introductory oceanography, "and I owe it all to the instructor." Another student, in Von Damm's analytical geochemistry class, said it in a single word: "WOW! Karen knows about every analysis instrument ever created!"
Each time she returns from an expedition, Von Damm brings with her a new supply of water samples for analysis. "This is my water library," she says, standing before a wall of samples, meticulously labeled and dated. "It's irreplaceable." Students learn to use the same methods and instruments Von Damm herself uses, and they learn to think like geochemists, asking questions about how water composition might affect biological communities or water circulation.
Along with water samples, Von Damm has brought back other specimens from her expeditions, including a chunk of a black smoker. Embedded in the stone are indentations, where tube worms were once attached--before being roasted to death in a boiling eruption.
Von Damm also returns from each expedition with a styrofoam cup. She has quite a collection now of miniature cups, decorated and dated for each cruise she's been on--and shrunk to a fraction of their original size by incredible pressure as they rode outside Alvin to the ocean floor.
Von Damm's students see these fragments of scientific research and adventure at sea; they hear true tales of science-in-action from one of the best in the field. And in the lab, they experience some of the adventure themselves, as they work with water samples from thousands of miles away--from an address known only as 9 degrees north, a mile and a half down in the world of black smokers and waving red tubeworms.
PHOTO CAPTION
Coffee anyone? Karen Von Damm's collection of miniature styrofoam cups, decorated and dated for each dive she's been on, shrank to a fraction of their normal size as they rode outside the submersible that carries scientists to the bottom of the sea. At a mile and a half down, pressure is two tons per square inch, 250 times the normal atmospheric pressure.