Is there an easy example of a (closed) hyperbolic 3-manifold that fibers over the circle but contains some totally geodesic surface?


(Of course such manifolds exist if the 'Virtually Fibered Conjecture' were correct, since a geodesic surface lifts to the fibered cover. But is there something more eplicit?) 



Totally geodesic surfaces in fibered 3-manifolds
There are many specific known examples. Here is one construction:


Start with the 3-torus $T^3$, parametrize in the standard way as $R^3/Z^3$. It fibers over the circle in many ways.
Let $a$, $b$ and $c$ be three disjoint circles, coming form lines parallel to the x, y and z axes.
For most fibrations, these three circles are transverse to the fibers.
Form a branched cover of the torus with two-fold branching over all preimages of these 3 circles. The resulting manifold has a hyperbolic structure that can be constructed from right-angled hyperbolic dodecahedra, and is commensurable with the 4-fold branched cover of $S^3$ over the Borromean rings. You can think of it this way: you can take a unit cube as fundamental domain for the torus, and arrange that a, b and c lie on faces of the cube, each bisecting a pari of (glued together) opposite facce. This induces a subdividision of the boundary of the cube into what look like rectangles, but are really pentagons. 


The map (x,y,z) -> x+y+z gives a fibration over the torus, also works for any branched cover as described. The preimage of any face of the cube is an extended face plane of a dodecahedron, and is always a totally geodesic immersed surface, but it splits into two embedded surfaces for suitable branched covers of $T^3$ (perhaps the one you first come up with.) 


The tiling of hyperbolic space by right-angled dodecahedra has a cameo appearance in the video "Not Knot" we made at the Geometry Center, available together with "Outside In" on DVD from [AKPeters](http://akpeters.com/searchresults.asp?type=quick&keywords=Not+Knot&btnSubmit.x=0&btnSubmit.y=0). In the 1984 Scientific American Article *The Mathematics of three-dimensional manifolds* that Jeff Weeks and I wrote, a manifold in this family (constructed from right-angled hyperbolic dodecahedra and having the properties you asked for) was described as the configuration space of a mechanical linkage. I don't think these particular properties were pointed out in Scientific American.


This and other examples that are counterintuitive at first were a good part of my motivation when I raised the question whether all hyperbolic 3-manifolds virtually fiber over the circle, which at the time was a radical idea.


