Researcher Egbert Schwartz and PolarTREC teacher Justin Kendhammer will travel to the Dry Valleys of Antarctica in search of life in the seemingly barren soil. One of the questions they will attempt to answer is whether microbes in the soil are native to Antarctic soil or whether they have been blown onto the continent from elsewhere in the world.
Have you ever wondered how polar scientists do it? How do they really know if the planet is losing vast quantities of ice anyway? You can use pictures from satellites to monitor the surface from year to year, but the vast majority of ice is hidden from view, buried beneath the surface in some of the most inhospitable and
Students will conduct a demonstration that will help them gain a better understanding of the water cycle and runoff in a watershed. They will be able to replicate arctic and non-arctic watersheds by varying the size of the watershed. They will be able to visualize the difference in runoff by creating hydrographs of these different locations.
Students will investigate the breadth and depth of science taking place in the Polar Regions by reading and learning about one PolarTREC expedition and sharing it with the class.
Objectives
* To expose students to the wide variety of science happening in the Polar Regions
* To help students understand the process of science by examining one
PolarTREC teacher Tim Spuck presented on his experience with the IceBridge project, monitoring Greenland's glaciers and how they are being affected by climate change.
In mid-April 2012, five teachers from Denmark, Greenland, and the United States, were given the experience of a lifetime. The teachers lived, worked, and flew alongside airborne polar scientists in Greenland, and saw firsthand how remote data are collected on NASA’s Operation IceBridge. In the process, the experience provided the educators with better tools to teach students about science. Read
This one hour event by Melissa Barker explains the research being done at Toolik Field Station, Alaska on nutrient transport in arctic watersheds. She is joined by team member Dr. Sarah Godsey.
In this one hour webinar PolarTREC teacher Tim Spuck explains his work with the NASA IceBridge Project, the largest airborne survey of Earth's polar ice ever conducted.