This lesson was written for the 2012 Arctic Ocean Ecosystem Workshop and was inspired by the research work conducted off the coast of Barrow, Alaska by researchers Steve Okonnen and Patricia Yager with PolarTREC teachers Lollie Garay and Chantelle Rose. Students will engage in a series of exercises to investigate seasonal change in the Arctic ecosystem based on authentic
The sediment in Lake El'gygytgyn, (pronounced EL-ge-GIT-gin) located in NE Siberia, holds one of the longest records of climate change anywhere in the continental Arctic. How does sediment (clay and mud) tell us something about past climate? Proxy data! By studying the microfossils of diatoms and pollen in the sediment, we can re-construct the lake environment millions of
This versatile activity was inspired by my own Antarctic voyage (Lollie Garay, Oden Expedition 07) and The Amazing Race. As my students followed the journey through the Antarctic Seas on a USGS map, I realized what a great opportunity this was for them to "see" where I was in a part of the world so foreign to us
Lake El'gygytgyn (also called, Lake E) permafrost drilling started in mid-November of 2008. The ICDP (International Continental Drilling Program) is posting news reports and images to this blog several times each week. Check out early reports from Lake E.
The Kuril Biocomplexity Project is a National Science Foundation-funded research project led by the University of Washington and being conducted by a team of American, Japanese and Russian scholars and students who are examining a 5000-year history of human-environmental interactions along the Kuril Island chain in the northwest Pacific Ocean. This is the link to the project website.
This activity is designed to take place near or at the end of a unit on the ocean floor. Students should be familiar with the physical features of the ocean floor including the continental shelf, abyssal plain, seamounts and guyots, seafloor ridges and trenches, and submarine canyons. The students should have also previously learned about sonar methods for mapping the