Student teams design and build solar water heating devices that mimic those used in residences to capture energy in the form of solar radiation and convert it to thermal energy. In this activity, students gain a better understanding of the three different types of heat transfer, each of which plays a role in the solar water heater design. Once the model devices are constructed, students perform efficiency calculations and compare designs.

Spreadsheets Across the Curriculum/Geology of National Parks module. Students use the geometric mean and multiplicative standard deviation to examine the right-skewed distribution of nutrient concentrations in water-quality data at Mammoth Cave National Park.

This video discusses two key signs of global change in the Southern Ocean: changes in Antarctic bottom water and ocean acidification.

This Web site profiles AMNH's Southwestern Research Station (SWRS), a year-round field station that allows biologists, geologists, and anthropologists to study the diverse environments and biotas of the Chiricahua Mountains in southeastern Arizona. The site includes an overview of the field station and its work, information on courses offered, and information for visitors, researchers, interns and volunteers.

In this video adapted from the University of Alaska, Anchorage, Alaska Native people of Chevak teach visitors about the beauty of Cup'ik culture and the spirit of the earth, sea, and animals.

In this activity, students calculate electricity use by state and determine, using Google Earth, how much land would be required to replace all sources of electricity with solar panels.

This profile provides maps, charts, and tables pertaining to state capacity and generation of renewable electricity. Tables include data for total net summer capacity and total net generation with rankings for each category. Users can view this data alphabetically by state, by capacity, or by generation. An interactive map allows users to navigate to specific state profiles and view the top 10 renewable capacity states simultaneously.

This short video clip summarizes NOAA's annual State of the Climate Report for 2009. It presents a comprehensive summary of Earth's climate in 2009 and establishes the last decade as the warmest on record. Reduced extent of Arctic sea ice, glacier volume, and snow cover reflect the effects of rising global temperature.

In this short activity, students create a timeline of climate science over the past 200 years and gather information from a U.S. Forest Service video about mitigation and adaptation strategies undertaken by the Service to address climate change in national forests.

This short cartoon video uses a simple baseball analogy (steroid use increases probability of hitting home runs) to explain how small increases in greenhouse gases can cause global temperature changes and increase the probability of extreme weather events.

In this video profile produced for Teachers' Domain, meet conservationist Steve MacLean, an Inupiaq from Barrow, Alaska, who works to preserve the health of the Bering Sea ecosystem.

In this activity, students build a water filter with activated carbon, cotton and other materials to remove chocolate powder from water.

This activity is a field study where students gather data on a stream based upon their protocol. They will correlate their data with another group and present their results to the class. They will develop and defend in class a new experimental question for a spring study.

This activity is a field investigation where students gather data on stream health by collecting macro-invertebrates at three different locations and then develop an experimental question through land use and topographic map research to explain differences in water quality.

Students learn about contact stress and its applications in engineering. They are introduced to the concept of heavy loads, such as buildings, elephants, people and traffic, and learn how those heavy loads apply contact stress. Through the analysis of their own footprints, students determine their contact stress.

In this activity, students research various topics about ocean health, e.g. overfishing, habitat destruction, invasive species, climate change, pollution, and ocean acidification. An optional extension activity has them creating an aquatic biosphere in a bottle experiment in which they can manipulate variables.

This NASA video reviews the role of the sun in driving the climate system. It uses colorful animations to illustrate Earth's energy balance and how increased greenhouse gases are creating an imbalance in the energy budget, leading to warming. The video also reviews how the NASA satellite program collects data on the sun.

During this project, students will be working to cooperatively create a field guide to trees in the neighborhood near the school. In doing so they will be making observations, introduced to tree and plant anatomy and physiology, and will learn how to make and use dichotomous keys.

Studying life on the seafloor beneath Antarctica's thick ice is a major challenge for ecologists. Learn about a new device that can reach those icy depths in this video segment adapted from WomenInAntarctica.com.

A short video on how changing climate is impacting the ecosystem and thereby impacting traditional lifestyles of the Athabaskan people of Alaska.