This Spring National Geographic Explorer Will Steger and a team of young adventurers will bring their High Arctic dogsled expedition to educators and learners through multimedia dispatches on www.globalwarming101.com. Follow Will and his teammates, all in their early twenties, as they retrace historical expedition routes on Ellesmere Island, encounter endangered wildlife, photograph disintegrating ice sheets that are collapsing into the ocean, mush across frozen sea ice, and visit an area on the frontlines of climate change. Endorsed by the National Education Association, this Adventure Learning project includes standards-linked multidisciplinary lesson plans that explore how climate shape...

This Spring National Geographic Explorer Will Steger and a team of young adventurers will bring their High Arctic dogsled expedition to educators and learners through multimedia dispatches on www.globalwarming101.com. Follow Will and his teammates, all in their early twenties, as they retrace historical expedition routes on Ellesmere Island, encounter endangered wildlife, photograph disintegrating ice sheets that are collapsing into the ocean, mush across frozen sea ice, and visit an area on the frontlines of climate change. Endorsed by the National Education Association, this Adventure Learning project includes standards-linked multidisciplinary lesson plans that explore how climate shape...

The University of the Arctic’s International Polar Year (IPY) Higher Education and Outreach project cluster encompasses a wide variety of IPY-approved projects, and among them is an exciting new college-level science course, “Environmental Radioactivity, Stewardship, and People of the North,” that successfully debuted during Fall Semester 2007 at the University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF). Development of the course was funded by a U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) grant, “Adapting SENCER to the Arctic—Improving Polar Science Education as a Legacy” (NSF 632397), to Principal Investigator and UAF professor Lawrence K. Duffy. SENCER (Science Education for New Civic Engagement and Responsibilities) is a national movement in U.S. education to reform the teaching of...

The Last Polar Bear records and celebrates one of nature’s most majestic creatures — the polar bear — and examines how global warming is affecting the fragile, complex Arctic environment. Polar bears use sea ice to move about, find mates and hunt for seals. As temperatures warm, the loss of the pack ice directly impacts their ability to survive. Scientists agree that Arctic ice is disappearing at an alarming rate. Last summer, sea ice levels plummeted to their lowest since satellite measurements began in 1979. And a new scientific study by the U.S. Geological Survey, released last fall, predicts that two-thirds of the world’s polar bears, including Alaska’s entire population, may disapp...

This morning, just 62 years ago, Byrd and his Ice Party members, including Yours Truly, sailed up the Bay to the D.C. Navy Yard... So wrote Dr. Alton A. Lindsey to the author on May 10, 1997 — he had turned 90 only three days before. In the early years of the Great Depression, he was at Cornell University studying for his doctorate in biology, when he interrupted this pursuit to serve as the Vertebrate Zoologist on the Byrd Antarctic Expedition II (1933-35). While the interior of the continent was canvassed by dog sled, tractor and airplane, Lindsey studied penguins, seals and other animals on the coast. ...

Denali Education Center Executive Director Willie Karidis began his 70-day winter expedition to retrace, research and celebrate the steps of pioneering naturalist Charles Sheldon on Tuesday, January 22, 2008. The trip has been a dream of Willie's for over twenty years, since he first read "Wilderness of Denali". That book chronicles Sheldon's experience as he spent the 1907-08 winter in the heart of the Alaska Range along the banks of the Upper Toklat River. It was during that time that he had a vision for a National Park to preserve the unique natural ecosystem he experienced for future generations. Willie is working as a park volunteer (VIP) during his expedition and is being provided support by the National Park Service. Willie planned to camp in the v...

In our previous post we wrote that we’d enter the Agulhas Current, a western boundary current, about 4 hours out of Durban. Here are some interesting facts about western boundary currents, and the Agulhas in particular: They originate from equatorial waters flowing westward in response to easterly winds. Where westerly equatorial flow meets a continental shelf, the equatorial current turns and becomes a western boundary current, earning its name. In the Northern Hemisphere, they veer right, flowing north; in the Southern Hemisphere, they veer left, flowing south. Along the western edges of ocean basins, they move warm water from equatorial latitudes toward the poles. Their warm-water transport mitigates, to some extent, the incoming solar energy difference ...

February 3, 2008: After a couple of days in South Africa, we’re adjusting to our new time zone. All participants are here now, and we’re setting up our shipboard labs. The vessel has 4,000 square feet of lab space shared among several projects. View the ship’s webcam. Our thoughts are focused on our teamwork, and we are practicing our CTD (conductivity, temperature, and depth) operation, which involves deploying and retrieving a large array of water collection bottles mounted on a room-size framework. The sample bottles are set up to open at a specified depth. We’ll have to be prepared to do this under harsh conditions. A front is...

The NASA HOW (History of Winter) program is held each February (since 2000) in Lake Placid, New York, USA. The HOW Program brings together teachers and learning professionals from around the United States to study SNOW, ICE and the WINTER ECOSYSTEM through intensive classroom and fieldwork exercises led by experts in the field. This year the program is held February 10-16. Also this year, The Global Snowflake Network (GSN) will be launched. Peter Wasilewski and Robert Gabrys created and developed the NASA HOW (History of Winter) program held each February since 2000. The primary foci of the weeklong program (February 10 - 16, 2008) are threefold: 1) SNOW - in the air and on the ground 2) ICE - crystal structure and axial orientation 3) WINTER E...

February 1, 2008: Hello! We are graduate students from the Department of Oceanography at Florida State University in Tallahassee, Florida, USA. We are participants in the CLIVARI6S Repeat Hydrography Research Project, sponsored by the National Science Foundation as one of the many activities of the International Polar Year (IPY). Professors Kevin Speer, William Landing, and Thorsten Dittmar, Post Doctoral Researcher Angie Milne, and Associate in Oceanography Peter Lazarevich will direct us, and we graduate students, Kati Gosnell, Katy Hill, Juliana D’Andrilli, Jun Dong, Ji-Young Paeng, and Austin Todd, are looking forward to a lot of invaluable hands-on experience. In Durban, South Africa, our port of departure, a fifth student, Loic Juillon, will join us, ...