This PolarConnect event on Antarctica Day (December 1) 2022 was broadcast live from the Dry Valleys of Antarctica with teacher Lucy Coleman and researcher Rachel Morgan-Kiss.
Students will collect soil samples and analyze them with some of the same procedures used by researchers in the McMurdo Dry Valleys, Antarctica. Soil microfauna (e.g. nematodes) will be extracted from the samples using a Baermann funnel. Students will compare their own data to published data from researchers working in Antarctica.
PolarTREC has been an amazing experience, wow! The heart of the PolarTREC program is the field expedition, which allows the teacher to be embedded in a field research team. STEM educators are passionate about what they teach but often lack access to meaningful opportunities to participate in basic research. Programs like PolarTREC provide that missing
In a “March Madness” game of survival of the fittest, will your microbe and its genes survive the test of changing conditions on Planet Earth and beyond? Students choose genes from a “toolbox” and pit their microbe against their classmates’, using critical thinking and argument writing to determine the microbe with the best chance of success. Based on PolarTREC
Teacher Josh Heward discusses research with the "Tough Tardigrades Team" in the McMurdo Dry Valleys in Antarctica where they search for tardigrades and other microorganisms that live in the soil.
Analogs are used in science investigations to better understand systems we can’t access ourselves. In this lesson, students explore the Dry Valleys of Antarctica to better understand microbial communities on early Earth and what might have been possible on ancient Mars. Students will examine photographs, written descriptions, and artistic renderings of early Earth, the Dry Valley lakes, and
Over three months in Antarctica, PolarTREC teacher Juan Botella took hundreds of pictures a day. He will now display many of those photos in an art exhibit entitled, "ArtArctic Science" at the Overture Center in Madison, WI. The exhibit includes not only Botella’s pictures but artwork by four Monona Grove high school students and two recent graduates.
Cups decorated by students at the Monona Grove School District, Monona WI. Some of them will be shrunk by sending them to the bottom of the Ocean around Antarctica. during the 2011-2012 PolarTREC expedition "Sea water property changes in the Southern Ocean"
Trip to Scripps Institution of Oceanography, La Jolla, CA to meet Dr. Jim Swift and team members that will participate in the 2011-2012 PolarTREC expedition "Sea water property changes in the Southern Ocean" (www.polartrec.com