PolarTREC teacher Emily Dodson participated in a scientific expedition in the summer of 2014 at Kangerlussuaq, Greenland. Emily’s book is a telling of the science story behind the teams work and Emily’s participation as an educator and field assistant on the PolarTREC expedition.
Author/Credit
To contact Emily <emily.snowden [at] fayette.kyschools.us>
The attached PDF contains 5 different lessons and lab activities for high school earth science, environmental science and biology classes. The focus is on permafrost and related topics including the earth’s carbon cycle, the greenhouse effect, climate change, and aqueous geochemistry. The diagrams and photographs included in this manual, along with additional visual materials, are included in the attached Thawing
Emily Dodson-Snowden, a sixth-grade science teacher at Morton Middle School, didn’t have a typical summer break. She spent three weeks in Greenland studying how climate change influences plant/pollinator interactions and plant reproduction as part of PolarTREC (Teachers and Researchers Exploring and Collaborating).
The journal assignment involves students in current science research. Through the teacher’s journals, they will learn about how the research teams work together, design their research, tools that are needed and how they live and work in an extreme environment.
Objective
Students will be able to:
1. Understand how scientific research is conducted in an extreme environment
Working in groups, students will use common materials to create layers of snow and ice representing thousands of years of stratification. Groups will exchange their ice layers and extract core samples to analyze them.
Objective
Notice the phenomenon of stratification.
Notice that layers can tell a story of change over time.
We go places, but what do we do with the billions of snippets of information we absorb? How do we process the information so that it means something to us when we can no longer be there? As a geographer, my objective was to be able to observe, participate and categorize the billions of pieces of visual information