O Perguntados das Ambientais é um jogo de cartas no formato de perguntas e respostas, cujo objetivo é abordar de forma lúdica e interdisciplinar o tema “água”, na tentativa de despertar o interesse dos alunos, minimizar dificuldades e consolidar conceitos científicos e aspectos socioambientais que envolvem a temática.
Esperamos que este material possa auxiliar na prática docente dos professores e que, a partir dele, os alunos sejam levados a refletir e adotar um pensamento críticos acerca das questões ambientais, especificamente da água.

The purpose of this resource is to develop an understanding of some of the relationships between soils of different types and water. Students will time the flow of water through soils with different properties and measure the amount of water held in these soils. They will also experiment with the filtering ability of soils by testing the pH of the water before and after it passes through the soil and observing changes to the clarity of the water and to the characteristics of the soil. Students will be able to explore the concept of Earth as a system.

In the Web-based game Kure Waste Chase, students take on the part of an Ocean Adventures expedition member volunteering for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and explore various habitats (beach, water surface and underwater) to collect as much harmful marine debris as possible in a limited amount of time. Use the tips and handouts below to turn the Kure Waste Chase game into a structured learning activity for your students.

In this introductory lab, students are introduced to the different components that make up the cryosphere and watch a NASA animation showing an example of how global land and sea ice coverage can change over the course of a single year. In the second part of the lab, students learn about some of the ways that changes in the cryosphere are already impacting human life.

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Using data on the world's water distribution, students calculate the percentage of water that is available to humans and examine graphics that illustrate the distribution. Students develop a sense of where the world's water is located and how it moves through the Earth system.

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In Part A of this activity, students will learn about how sea ice forms and influences ocean currents around the globe. In Part B, they will look at how sea ice thickness changes over time. Finally, in Part C, students will use NSIDC sea ice index data to explore changes in sea ice extent on multiple time scales including months, years, and decades.

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Students build a physical model to explore watershed features, then use Google Earth software to tie the model to a real place. By exploring several layers of map-based images and data, students develop an appreciation of the complexity of a watershed and river system in the context of a both a local and national scale.

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In this Lab students focus their attention on an area significantly larger than their study site as they apply their developing knowledge of local Earth system interactions to the regional scale. Although the scale changes, the questions remain the same. How does organism or process or event "A" influence, or become changed by organism or process or event "B"? Specifically, in what ways is my local region interconnected with adjoining regions? What types of matter and energy cross the regional boundaries to help define and shape the neighboring regions?
Although students will investigate the region in which they live, the concept of a "study site" changes: instead of focusing their attention on an actual plot of land, students will investigate their region by combining their personal knowledge of the region with information they can learn from Google Earth.

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In the first part of this lab, students learn about land ice and the processes and timescales involved in glaciation. In Part B, they use an online interactive to explore how glaciers provide scientists with evidence for climate change. Finally, students use image processing software to measure how much area a real glacier has lost over time due to rising temperatures.

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In this activity students develop a practical understanding of the causes and symptoms of drought. They read background articles and prepare a physical model to illustrate the role that soil moisture plays in preventing or promoting drought. Students use Google Earth to examine precipitation and streamflow data and use them to predict locations that are experiencing drought. They check their predictions by comparing them to a drought monitor map. In the final section, students examine and interpret the current map of the Palmer Drought Severity Index.

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America's most famous drought resulted in an environmental disaster called the Dust Bowl. From 1931 to 1939, a five-state region of the Great Plains received little rain and experienced horrendous dust storms that stripped the land of its topsoil. The event went on to shape the demographics of the American West as thousands of people migrated out of the plains and on to western states.
In this activity, students will watch a PBS video and/or interact with the video's companion website. They will also examine maps and animations that show the distribution of drought patterns over the past 300 years; these maps were reconstructed from environmental records. Finally, students will examine the amount of time different areas spend in drought.

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Students have been examining Earth as a system of interacting parts, initially from the local perspective but more recently from the regional and global perspectives. In order to fully understand the Earth as a system and how its components interact with each other, students need to consider change over time. On relatively short times scales, these changes are related to the fact that the solar energy that drives the Earth system passes through an atmosphere that varies across space and time before reaching a spinning sphere. Across longer seasonal and annual time scales, these changes are more specifically related to the differential heating that results from the tilt of Earth's axis and Earth's orbit around the sun. At this longer-term global scale, it may be easier to see the repeating patterns of change across space and time and to infer how changes in one sphere may be linked to changes in others.

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When populations live in areas where natural resources are scarce, conserving them becomes critical for survival. The case study presented in this lesson introduces students to a real drought that has been developing in the Colorado River basin for many years. The Colorado River is the major source of water for people in the driest part of the United States. More than 30 million people in 7 states depend on this river as the primary source of their water.
In this lesson, students discover how changes in climate over the Colorado watershed are reducing the amount of fresh water available in the river. They also see how the population of the region that uses this water has grown, resulting in increasing demands on a dwindling resource.

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Students examine interactions and feedback between the cryosphere and atmosphere. In the first part of this investigation, students do a hands-on activity to explore albedo and how sea ice helps regulate global temperatures.

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In this lab, students apply the concepts of earlier lessons to their own community. They begin by exploring economic, environmental, and social impacts of drought. Students then prepare for and stage a mock community meeting to draw up plans to face an upcoming drought.

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In this activity students explore how to reduce vulnerability to drought risk through mitigation strategies. Students investigate one or more of four technology-based mitigation strategies by reading articles or viewing short podcasts and completing hands-on activities. Students make a presentation or poster to communicate their findings to the class.

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Students explore issues related to the rapid intensification of hurricanes. They become familiar with the concepts of heat energy and the specific heat of water and interact with animations of sea surface temperature images to identify the Gulf Stream and the Loop Current. Students use NOAA View and Google Earth, free data-image tools, to explore visualizations of heat content in the Gulf of Mexico just before Hurricane Katrina. The examine a plotted path of Katrina as an overlay on these visualizations and observe changes in the heat content of Gulf waters as the hurricane passed over it.

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This textbook is a comprehensive lab manual for the core curriculum Introductory Geosciences classes with both informational content and laboratory exercises. Topics include basic laws and theories in Geology, the Earth's interior and plate tectonics, water and climate change, igneous rocks and volcanoes, and earthquakes.

Waste disposal has been an ongoing problem since medieval times. Environmental engineers are employed to develop technologies to dispose of the enormous amount of trash produced in the United States. In this lesson, students will learn about the three methods of waste disposal in use by modern communities. They will also investigate how engineers design sanitary landfills to prevent leachate from polluting the underlining groundwater.

In this video profile produced for Teachers' Domain, meet La'ona DeWilde, an environmental biologist who integrates her Athabascan heritage and her Western scientific training to help remote Alaskan villages address environmental issues.