Hello Anne,

Happy December! This month, CLEAN is providing resources for you to take your class on an ice expedition. They will discover glacier ice and its impacts on the Earth's climate, as well as people's day to day lives.

Polar Science & Ice Focused Lesson Plans

• Activity: Polar Lab
• Video: Adaptation: Ice Stupas of Ladakh
• Article: The Big Thaw

CLEAN Resource Feature: Activity

Activity: Polar Lab

Audience: Middle, High School

Using a combination of clickable 360 degree landscapes, 2D and 3D videos, animations, interviews with scientists, and mini-games, the Polar Lab takes players onto the glacier ice and into the lab in search of evidence to answer big questions about Earth's climate—past, present, and future. They search for plant and animal fossils that can reveal what this Arctic and Antarctic environment was like 50 million years ago. Students examine two kinds of clues that act as time capsules for exploring the past: mud cores and ice cores. Finally, students examine the rapid retreat of the massive glaciers and sea ice to better understand how changing ice conditions affect animals.

This activity takes three to six 60 minute class periods.

CLEAN Resource Feature: Video

Video: Adaptation: Ice Stupas of Ladakh

Audience: Middle, High School, College Lower

In this video, learn how communities in the arid high-mountain region of Ladakh rely on glacial water to feed streams and water crops during the spring and summer months. Global warming is dramatically reshaping the future of these areas. Meet a Ladakhi teacher and engineer who devised a method to capture and store glacial runoff into magnificent ice pyramids that are used as water resources throughout the summer and during peak agricultural months.

Video length is 16:02 min.

Read: The Big Thaw

Article: The Big Thaw

"They're [Daniel Fagre and two other research scientists from the U.S. Geological Survey Global Change Research Program] doing what they've been doing for more than a decade: measuring how the park's storied glaciers are melting. So far, the results have been positively chilling. When President Taft created Glacier National Park in 1910, it was home to an estimated 150 glaciers. Since then the number has decreased to fewer than 30, and most of those remaining have shrunk in area by two-thirds. Fagre predicts that within 30 years most if not all of the park's namesake glaciers will disappear."

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