The objectives of this lesson are:
* Students will know that climate change is happening most quickly in Arctic regions.
* Students will know that a warming climate is causing permafrost to thaw.
* Students will know that thawing permafrost is impacting infrastructure in Alaska, including roads and buildings.
* Students will design an engineering solution to create stable
Students will use a model to explore the relationships between sunlight and release of carbon dioxide (CO2) from thawing Arctic watersheds.
After studying the carbon cycle, students are asked to reflect on how natural phenomena – thawing of permafrost, interactions of soil microbes on dissolved carbon, and amount of sunlight – interconnect and influence the release of CO2
The report is written by teacher participants upon return from their field expedition portion of the PolarTREC program. It summarizes the benefit of the expedition to the teacher, a description of activities, and a summary of how teachers plan to link this experience in classrooms and communities. This is a public document that will be posted in teacher portfolios and
In this activity, students diagram the hydrologic cycle. Most of the concepts will already be familiar to middle and high school students, but this activity is a good way to prepare for making the far more challenging carbon cycle and energy NON-cycle diagrams.
Objective
* Students understand that the total amount of water on Earth is constant
In this activity, students diagram the flow of energy through the Earth's ecosystems. A lot of the concepts presented here are necessary in order to fully understand the greenhouse effect and global warming. This lesson is presented as an activity to do before embarking on a study of the greenhouse effect and global warming. Unlike water or carbon
In this activity, students diagram the carbon cycle. A lot of the concepts presented here are necessary in order to fully understand the greenhouse effect and global warming. This lesson is presented as an activity to do before embarking on a study of the greenhouse effect and global warming.
Each group of 2-4 students will research an arctic topic from a list, build a small web page devoted to that topic, link the group’s page to other groups’ relevant pages, and advocate for change around an issue that is important to the topic.
Objective
Students will understand the complexity and vulnerability of Arctic ecosystems
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