This activity is part of the Antarctica's Climate Secrets flexhibit. Students learn about and create models of glaciers and ice sheets, ice shelves, icebergs and sea ice.
In this activity, students chart temperature changes over time in Antarctica's paleoclimate history by reading rock cores. Students use their data to create an interactive display illustrating how Antarctica's climate timeline can be interpreted from ANDRILL rock cores.
The students get to be climate detectives as they make a model of sediment cores using different kinds of glass beads and sand. They learn how to examine the types, numbers, and conditions of diatom skeletons in the model sediment cores and tell something about the hypothetical paleoclimate that existed when they were deposited.
In this activity, students make a model sea floor sediment core using two types of buttons to represent fossil diatoms. They then compare the numbers of diatom fossils in the sediment at different depths to determine whether the seas were free of ice while the diatoms were alive.
Students investigate how sea levels might rise when ice sheets and ice caps melt. By constructing a pair of models, students can observe the effects of ice melt in two different situations.
In this activity, students learn about the tools and methods paleoclimatologists use to reconstruct past climates. In constructing sediment cores themselves, students will achieve a very good understanding of the sedimentological interpretation of past climates that scientists can draw from cores.
In this hands-on activity, participants learn the characteristics of the five layers of the atmosphere and make illustrations to represent them. They roll the drawings and place them in clear plastic cylinders, and then stack the cylinders to make a model column of the atmosphere.
This activity is a hands-on guided inquiry activity designed to highlight the role of an ice shelf on slowing the movement of continental ice sheets in Antarctica. Students build a model of Antarctica and both continental glaciers and ice shelves using paper models of the land and slime for glaciers and ice. Students use their model to explore the impact of recent and potential ice shelf melting and break-up.