How do we know what kind of phytoplankton are in the water? The Imaging FlowCytobot (IFCB) is a robot that scientists use to image phytoplankton in the water. One IFCB can take up to 30,000 pictures per hour! The IFCB can be used in the field to detect plankton blooms in real time. In this activity, students will practice
From July 19, 2022, to August 15, 2022, I participated in the Harmful Algal Blooms in Arctic Waters research cruise on the R/V Norseman II. The Chief Scientist was Dr. Robert Pickart from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), and the research team included scientists from WHOI, Oregon State University, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation
This event with teacher Rebecca Siegel was broadcast live on 4 August 2022 from the Norseman II in Arctic waters. Rebecca is joined by team members from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute working on Harmful Algal Blooms in Arctic Waters.
For this activity, the students are going to draw on their own knowledge and experience with weather to predict the current temperatures around the world and then compare their predictions with real-time weather data from selected locations around the world. The students will then be provided with several factors that affect both daily changes in temperature and climatological temperature
Never, in my 27 year career as a teacher, have I had so many students so interested and enthusiastic in so many broad and varied topics that they would have immediately dismissed as “boring” had I not participated in PolarTREC. I was happily mystified by the curiosity of the students and the depth of their interest in
PolarTREC Teacher Mike Penn and team leader Lee Welhouse discuss the science and their experiences while working in Antarctica on the Automatic Weather Stations. This event was broadcast live from South Pole Station on 17 December 2018.
This is an article in a local quarterly magazine (IN Shaler Winter 2018 ed.) about Mike Penn's PolarTREC deployment to Antarctica with the 2018 Automatic Weather Stations project.
This is a newspaper article from the Pittsburgh Post Gazette that ran on 10/5/18. It is about PolarTREC teacher Michael Penn's expedition to Antarctica in November and December of 2018.
This is a radio interview with WESA (Pittsburgh Public Radio) on "The Confluence" with PolarTREC teacher Mike Penn and Kevin Gavin. Penn's interview starts at approximately 18:05.