Note to Editors: Educators wishing to receive free copies of the CD-ROM can email: nsidc@kryos.colorado.edu or call NSIDC User Services at (303) 492-3723.
Students and teachers around the world now have free access to climate secrets that have lain frozen in ice for millennia, thanks to a new CD-ROM produced by the University of Colorado at Boulder-based National Snow and Ice Data Center.
Funded by the National Science Foundation's Arctic System Science program, the CD-ROM project provides teachers and students with Greenland ice core data used by scientists and university students, said Rachel Hauser, a science writer at the National Snow and Ice Data Center who helped develop the CD-ROM. Accompanying the data are lessons and activities appropriate to high school and college earth science, geography, history, social studies and chemistry courses.
The project, titled "Into the Arctic," was inspired by the data and research resulting from the Greenland Ice Sheet Project 2, or GISP2, the longest ice core record in the Northern Hemisphere. Beginning in 1993, scientists from around the world gathered to drill deep into the Greenland ice sheet, eventually hauling up two miles of core and 200,000 years of global change history, including valuable information from an interglacial and two glacial periods.
Like pages in a book, each annual band of ice can reveal past temperatures and precipitation levels, the chemistry of ancient atmospheres and even the timing, magnitude and direction of distant storms, fires and volcanic eruptions, said CU-Boulder geological sciences Associate Professor James White.
White, one of the world聮s top ice core scientists, was a principal investigator on the GISP2 project. Funded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, he and CU associate researcher Eric Steig of the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research helped to assemble much of the information for "Into the Arctic" by using their own data and data contributed by other GISP2 scientists.
"Students can now get their hands on real data from ice cores and plot out solutions to case studies," he said. "It聮s great to see the ice-core data out there and being used by the public, something that would not have happened 10 years ago."
The CD-ROM activities are designed to present science in a fun, comprehensible manner, Hauser said. For example, various scenarios furnish students with data to detect gases and particulates present in the ancient atmosphere.
Students might also use the data to detect sulfates trapped in the environmental record after the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, find trace metals discharged following meteor impacts, or see traces of coal dust released during the Industrial Revolution.
Similarly, oxygen isotopes within the ice provide a record of temperature changes that have occurred over time, allowing students to detect several Ice Ages, as well as the cold periods that chased the Vikings out of Greenland. They also can pinpoint warming signifying interglacial periods.
In a 1998 study authored by INSTAAR聮s Steig, White, Scott Lehman and several other scientists, temperatures at both poles roughly 12,500 years ago were found to rise about 20 degrees F in 50 years, indicating the warming event was global.
"The subject material of "Into the Arctic" ranges from background on climate and climate change to studies of GISP2 and El Ni帽o, providing readers with Earth science background required for the accompanying case studies," said Hauser.
NSIDC is part of the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, a joint institute of CU-Boulder and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration headquartered on campus.
For more information or to order the CD, please see the following web site: arcss.colorado.edu/Catalog/arcss069.html.