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When asked about this IPY Day, sea ice scientist, Don Perovich (IPY project 95), replied: September 21 is excellent timing for a sea ice day. There is a tremendous amount of sea ice activity going on. There was an international sea ice summer school with more than 100 students from dozens of countries in July. There is currently a tremendous amount of sea ice activity going on in IPY. This summer there have been icebreakers from Canada, Sweden, Russia, and the U.S. conducting research in the Arctic and deploying autonomous sensors to monitor the changing sea ice cover. There have been ice camps at the North Pole and in the Beaufort Sea, along with work out of terrestrial...
How does ice floating on the ocean act as it melts?
Download this activity as a PDF: What Happens When Sea Ice Melts
How does ice floating on the ocean act as it melts?
Main photo: Salt water on left and fresh on right
Materials per pair of students:
2-2 oz. blue ice cubes
(In a small plastic cup, freeze 2 ozs of water mixed with 6 drops of blue food coloring)
2-16 ounce clear cups
(Fill one with tap water and one with tap water saturated with salt)
Directions:
1. Draw two glasses on a piece of paper.
2. Label one “fresh water” and the other “salt water.”
3. Draw a predict...
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Friday, 07 September 2007 14:53
WHAT HAPPENS TO OCEAN WATER WHEN IT FREEZES?
Written by Rhian Salmon
Activity time: 20-30 minutes + freezing time
PDF version, with pictures, to download: Sea ice and circulation activity.pdf
BACKGROUND:
The freezing temperature of water depends on the amount of dissolved salts (salinity). Normal ocean water, with a salinity of about 3.4%, begins to freeze when temperatures reach about -1.9°C. At its maximum extent in the winter, sea ice covers about 19 million square kilometres of the Southern Ocean near Antarctica. Approximately 80% of this ice melts each summer, contributing to the global mixing of ocean water.
Vertical mixing of ocean water, known as ‘overturning circulation’ or ‘thermohaline...
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Learn more about Sea Ice by doing an experiment, following a cruise, contacting a scientist, or designing your own community event. Launch a virtual balloon to show your involvement, and watch as people around the world join in! Quick Ways that Teachers and Students can learn more about Sea Ice, and get involved on September 21st! Download this Polar Sea Ice Day flyer (PDF) in your language: English, Chinese...
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Wednesday, 05 September 2007 21:39
Solstices, Equinoxes, and the Polar Regions
Written by Rhian Salmon
From the perspective of the North or South Pole, every year is essentially one long day that lasts half a year and one long night lasting the other half. This has enormous impact on how much solar energy is received in different times of year, which in turn influences physical processes, such as the freezing and thawing of snow and ice, biological processes, such as migration, and the lives of people who live in polar regions.
If the Earth were perpendicular on its axis, everywhere on the planet would receive an equal amount of sunshine (and darkness) every day. But because of the tilt of the Earth on its axis (currently 23.5 degrees off the perpendicular), only two days a year — the Equinoxes every spring and fall — have equal amounts of sunshine everywhere.
...
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To aid broad interdisciplinary discovery of IPY data, the IPY Data Policy and Management Subcommittee has created an initial metadata profile. A metadata profile is a set of required fields and vocabularies for a given metadata standard.
The purpose of the IPY Metadata Profile is to ensure that we capture a bare minimum of information necessary to allow simple discovery across disciplines and to ensure we can track the heritage of the metadata in a broadly distributed data management environment.
All IPY data registries and repositories collecting data and metadata from IPY projects are required to collect and share sufficient information to adhere to the IPY Metadata Profile requirements. Similarly, IPY projects are required to submit the compliant metadata t...
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In response to journalists and educators wanting an 'angle' on the extremely broad International Polar Year, quarterly "IPY Days" are being developed that focus on a particular aspect of polar research, and highlight current research occurring as part of IPY. The first of these will be held on September 21st and will focus on Sea Ice. Below is a list of IPY projects that study, or are concerned with, some aspect of Sea Ice. Their webpages contain a huge amount of information. For direct contact with researchers, please consult this list of sea ice experts. The following list includes IPY ID and chart name, and short title 8 ...
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Thursday, 23 August 2007 19:17
Poster: Climate change over the past 800,000 years
Written by Louise Huffman
The aims of AntonyJinman.com are three-fold:
To promote Education through Expedition
To report credible eye witness accounts of climate change
To promote sustainable technology for the future.
"Through exploring remote locations around the world I aim to highlight environmental issues within the classroom. Expedition takes us to places that few people have been to. To travel to a place and experience such environments first hand is so much more powerful than reading a textbook in a classroom. Through use of film and photography I aim to share these experiences, to educate and inspire. "
...
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The aims of AntonyJinman.com are three-fold:
To promote Education through Expedition
To report credible eye witness accounts of climate change
To promote sustainable technology for the future.
"Through exploring remote locations around the world I aim to highlight environmental issues within the classroom. Expedition takes us to places that few people have been to. To travel to a place and experience such environments first hand is so much more powerful than reading a textbook in a classroom. Through use of film and photography I aim to share these experiences, to educate and inspire. "
...
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