This student lesson focuses on plate tectonics and large-scale system interactions, utilizing PolarTREC teacher Brian DuBay's Transantarctic Mountains expedition videos.
Objectives: The student will investigate, make observations, and analyze geologic processes of plate tectonics.
Key concepts include:
a) how geologic processes are evidenced in Antarctic mountains;
b) tectonic processes (compressional, tensional, and transversal forces).
Adapted by Michelle Brand Buhanan for
In this lesson, students will play a fun board game that teaches about the sources and types of some air pollutants, and how they affect the health of both people and the environment. Students will learn that not all pollutants are greenhouse gases. This game can be a lead-in for a discussion about climate change and what people can
Melting permafrost in a warming world could mean lots of greenhouses gasses, especially methane, released into the atmosphere. But it also means an unusual community of soil bacteria coming out of hibernation, so to speak. A new study looks at what those permafrost microbes do, exactly, as their environment warms up.
Using samples from a field site at Alaska's Hess Creek, researchers from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the U.S. Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute and the U.S. Geological Survey collaborated to study how permafrost-dwelling microbes generate greenhouse gases as their environments thaw.