FAIRHOPE — Even when Megan O’Neill was on top of the world this year, working and living a few hundred miles from the north pole, she was never far from her students at Fairhope High School.

At least not in this age of the Internet, podcasts and satellite phones.

“How does it feel to be so far away from home?” one Fairhope student, Eric Farmer, asked her by e-mail on Aug. 14.

She read his message aboard the B.I.O. Hesperides, a 269-foot-long Spanish icebreaker that was returning to port at Longyearbyen, one of the northernmost cities on the planet, after a 20-day research project to map the ocean’s floor to better understand the effect of climate change in that frozen part of the world east of Greenland and north of Finland.

“It is amazing to realize just how far away I am and very exciting,” O’Neill answered by e-mail the same day. “This is by far the farthest I’ve been from home. It really is fantastic to see different parts of the world to be able to better relate to people and the global world that we live in.”

O’Neill, who directs the AquaScience program at FHS, was one of 12 teachers in the nation selected this year by the National Science Foundation’s Armada Project to work in places like Antarctica, Alaska, the Pacific Ocean, Greenland or the Gulf of Mexico, or in the Arctic Ocean north of Svalbard, the island where Longyearbyen is located and O’Neill landed on July 25 after her day-long journey from the Mobile airport. She worked aboard the ship with 21 scientists, most are professors and doctoral students from the University of Barcelona in Spain along with a few international students, several journalists and about 50 crew.

“I would get up at 3:30 a.m., eat, work from 4 to 8, have breakfast, go to bed until 8:30 a.m., wake up at 10, write my journal, workout in the exercise room, go back to work from 4 to 8 p.m., then to bed by 10 p.m.,” she said.

She posted her journal daily on the Armada Project’s Web site so her students could monitor her travels and experiences. The e-mail she answered on Aug. 14 was one of 17 student questions she answered that day in a journal entry running four single-spaced pages.

She also took hundreds of pictures that she has put together in a PowerPoint presentation that she will share with other teachers and students during this school year.

Whale-sightings were frequent, dolphins less so, one moose up-close on land, but the only polar bear she saw was a stuffed one at a shop in Longyearbyen. And no penguins, she answered one student: those are only found in the Antarctic. She did see towering glaciers on Svalbard and went close enough by ship to the large icebergs floating nearby to hear them crackling as they melted in the water.

“It sounded like that candy you’d put in your mouth that made a popping sound,” she told some of her students this week as they stood transfixed, watching a digital video of her bundled up on deck when she talked with her class by satellite phone in August.

“That’s awesome,” one student said, staring up at her teacher on the TV screen.

But what O’Neill saw most during her trip were miles of cold dark arctic sea in every direction with no land in sight. And she could see that 24 hours a day since the sun never set at that latitude 12 degrees shy of the north pole.

The research project was a successful one, she said, because the scientists were able to pull up core samples — after several tries — from the ocean’s floor more than a mile from the surface. She said those muddy ancient pieces from the deep will be used to analyze climate conditions that existed during the late Pliocene Epoch several million years ago.

One of the things that O’Neill admired about those scientists was their ability to solve problems far from land.

“They don’t have the luxury of picking up the phone and calling someone for assistance,” she said. “The project leader has to put together a team based on what might happen. That was what impressed me, and the breadth of knowledge of the scientists on board.”

Some of her students said the same thing about their experiences in the classes that O’Neill teaches.

“It’s been different than any science class I’ve had,” said senior Kayla McCrory, 17. “I learned a lot about responsibility having to care for living organisms. You have to check the pH levels and feed the fish. Those things can’t wait.”

O’Neill took over the AquaScience lab from Karon Bishop, now a senior counselor at Daphne High School. The classroom and lab are housed in their own building with adjacent greenhouses for the large 880-gallon fish tanks and a farm where they grow sea grasses for dune restoration projects in the county.

“The best way to get kids to learn about science is get their hands dirty,” Bishop said. “Instead of just talking about fishes, you work with fishes. It’s not a traditional teaching program. Those fish are there 24 hours a day. It’s a living breathing lab.”

It’s also take a special kind of teacher.

“Megan is a lover of the environment and is someone that is passionate about teaching,” Bishop said. “She has that enthusiasm, and that enthusiasm really works well with the students getting involved.”

O’Neill is a fourth-generation teacher but did not set out to become one. After graduating from Auburn University with a degree in environmental science, she worked for environmental engineering firms in Birmingham and Pensacola before starting her teaching career at FHS and also working on a master’s in secondary education at the University of South Alabama.

“I swore I wouldn’t be a teacher,” she said. “But it just wasn’t fulfilling being a consultant.”

She said that her mother was very excited that one of her daughters kept up the tradition.

“I tell my students sometimes it’s not the quantity of the money you make but the quality of your time that counts,” O’Neill said. “ If you enjoy what you do, you don’t work a day in your life.”

In addition to getting her master’s in December 2004, O’Neill received National Board Certification as a teacher in December 2006.

FHS Principal Beverly Thomas said that certification is difficult to obtain but does bring real benefits to the teacher’s school.

“When a teacher receives notification that they have received this certification, they receive $5,000 for equipment for the school,” she said. “Megan is a great teacher. She works hard in the classroom … and also sponsors the yearbook, which is a huge undertaking.”

Thomas said that part of the requirements of O’Neill’s participation in the Armada Project will be sharing her experiences with students and teachers and mentoring a teacher on the faculty this year.

On Wednesday, yearbook students were checking in with their teacher before heading out to sell ads and other tasks, getting hands-on experience in putting a publication like that together. O’Neill seemed to be doing about a dozen things at once, working on computer, gathering materials together from her trip, writing on the board, all while talking, laughing and encouraging her students, and all while beaming with a bright smile, and making it all seem so easy.

Then a worker from the construction project at the school walked in to talk about turning off her power while they worked.

“If it’s more than three hours my fish aren’t going to make it,” she said. “And if you cut the gas line, I won’t have a generator.”

She wasn’t smiling then.

“We’’ll try and go under that,” he said quickly.

“Well, if the generator’s running, then they should be alright,” she said.

The next day, she walked through the greenhouses, checking on the more than a dozen large tanks and smaller aquariums, where all the fish were swimming about apparently with no ill effects from the previous day.

Satisfied with their safety, O’Neill talked about what else she wanted to do for the program and for her students, and how to further her own education.

If I don’t keep learning, I won’t be doing my job for the kids,” she said.

Then she laughed and recalled one time she will never forget from her trip to the arctic.

“I’ll never forget where I was when I turned 33 because it’s right there on the side of the ship in big numbers.”

She celebrated her birthday this year on top of the world doing work she loves in a place few people will ever see but which now her students will learn about with her help.

“I took her class for the hands-on experience,” said senior Catherine Croker, 17. “Because you need different ways of learning in life.”