This lesson plan transports students to two field sites outside of Fairbanks, Alaska to investigate the interconnected relationships between climate change and permafrost. Students will use authentic field data from site photographs, soil temperature, and thaw depth measurements to draw inferences. An ESRI StoryMap, faux field journal, and 360 site images are used to engage students in the inquiry
The Energetic Ray Global Observatory (ERGO) is a program that will provide students and teachers with a small detector that is capable of detecting the cosmic rays in a manner very similar to CosRAY and IceCube. The unit is small and will allow data to be exported automatically to Google Maps.
Plans for the Berkeley National Laboratory cosmic ray detector. This detector can be built by high school teachers and can be used to study cosmic rays in a method similar to the antarctic particle studies (CosRAY and IceCube).
NASA's Operation IceBridge images Earth's polar ice in unprecedented detail to better understand processes that connect the Polar Regions with the global climate system. IceBridge uses a specialized fleet of aircraft and the most sophisticated suite of science instruments ever assembled to gather data on sea ice, glaciers, and ice sheets. The data gathered today will allow future scientists
What is it and why do we use it?
A CTD — an acronym for Conductivity, Temperature, and Depth — is the primary tool for determining essential physical properties of sea water. It gives scientists a precise and comprehensive charting of the distribution and variation of water temperature, salinity, and density that helps to understand how the oceans affect life
What is it and why do we use it?
An Acoustic Doppler Current Profiler, or Acoustic Doppler Profiler, is often referred to with the acronym ADCP. Scientists use the instrument to measure how fast water is moving across an entire water column. An ADCP anchored to the seafloor can measure current speed not just at the bottom, but also at
In this lesson students will learn how to use photography to support scientific research by documenting collected measurement information through observational photography. This lesson was written for a Photography course, to be taught in a lab with access to either a darkroom or computers/printers. Alternatively this lesson could be modified to work in a non-photography class, by removing the photography
Summit Station, Greenland Website. The station is located atop 3200 m of ice and is nearly 400 km from the nearest point of land. Summit supports a diversity of scientific research, including year-round measurements of air-snow interactions that provide crucial knowledge for interpreting data from deep ice cores drilled both at Summit and elsewhere.
Teacher Betsy Wilkening and researchers publish an article in the Journal of Geophysical Research stemming from their work on the PolarTREC OASIS project.