Ice is a medium that nearly everyone is familiar with. We put it in drinks, skate on it for hockey and scrape it off our windshields in winter. Ice can be turned into sculptures and can even make for some fantastic winter scenery. Ice can also turn into a kaleidoscope of color and patterns under the right circumstances. Science
This lesson is intended to help students make connections to polar science while discovering how and why sea ice drives deep ocean currents. Students will also learn key terminology related to sea ice and using actual salinity content charts, will graph a typical sea ice core’s salinity as it relates to depth.
This is an article detailing the alarming rate at which the Arctic is changing. The article goes through the specific examples of Sea ice, Greenland, Wildfires and Permafrost. This is a readable article for advanced middle school and high school students, and an excellent resource for teachers.
Learning about feedback mechanisms is an important part of understanding how climate change will play out in the near and long term. Students are also exposed to the idea that scientists create simple models of complex climate systems and that feedback mechanisms play a crucial role in climate modeling.
This 1.5 hour webinar is for the teachers and researchers of the 2014-2015 field season. Each team introduces themselves and the science projects in addition to a summary of the PolarTREC program.
This 1 hour webinar celebrates Antarctica Day 2015 with PolarTREC teacher Michelle Brown and the Human Impacts in Antarctica 2015 expedition. Michelle and her team are on the ice, at McMurdo Station, sharing their research project with the webinar audience.
This one hour webinar is a great look at the PolarTREC 2014-5 Antarctic expeditions. Each teacher presents on the research projects, implementation in the classroom, and outreach into communities.
Note: This event was not for our typical classroom-based education audience.
WAIS Divide (West Antarctic Ice Sheet), where the Velvet Ice team conducted its research, has recently be found to be one of the most vulnerable areas of Antarctica to global climate change. If recent predictions hold true, major glaciers in WAIS could collapse within 100 years, triggering massive shifts