This content has been created with the intent for the teacher to develop it to best suit their classroom setting. In its most basic form, students are asked to analyze wet and dry berry data to determine how water content changes (or doesn’t) for several berry species over the course of one season.
This lesson has multiple stages or
The night before I left Alaska I stayed up chatting with some of the scientists in the Toolik dining hall talking about my return to “normal civilization”. We spoke about the little habits that you pick up while at the field station and aren’t sure you’re going to let go (wearing sunglasses 24/7) as well as
This is the archive of the PolarConnect event with teacher Liza Backman and the team from the Phenology and Vegetation in the Warming Arctic 2021 expedition who presented live from Toolik Field Station in Alaska on 15 June 2021.
News article on teacher Liza Backman and her experiences preparing for a trip to the Arctic to work on the phenology of arctic plants in a warming climate.
Teacher Nell Kemp and researcher Rebecca Hewitt discuss field work and research on the Deep Roots project. The research team is studying the matrix of soils, roots and fungal hyphae that may play a critical role in the trajectory of future climate change. This project is based out of Toolik Field Station and Healy, Alaska.
An article describing Kevin Anchukaitis' work at the Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory. Tree rings embody a record of climate change going back thousands of years, and they grow on every continent except Antarctica. “They let us reconstruct climate around the world, in both space and time."
Humans are creative. They try to solve problems in original ways. For example, some scientists are thinking of ways to decrease the amount of greenhouse gases in the air. Other scientists are thinking of ways to limit the amount of sun that reaches Earth so that the Earth won’t get so warm. Like most ideas, there are pros (good
Textbooks say that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas and can make earth's climate hotter. Try this lab to see if carbon dioxide gas can really act like a greenhouse.
Objectives
Students should be able to make a hypothesis, perform an experiment, analyze data and write a conclusion based on the evidence from their experiment.
Article describing PolarTREC teacher Susy Ellison's recent expeditions to Alaska to take part in a tree ring study in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and an archaeological expedition in Kivalina.