Teaching Climate

This video considers the current estimates of sea level rise as possibly too conservative and discusses more recent data on ice melt rates coming from Antarctica and Greenland, showing rates of melt at up to 5 times as rapid. Scientists discuss what levels and rates of sea level rise have occurred in the past, including the Pliocene, which demonstrated 1m rise every 20 years.

This visualization illustrates the carbon cycle throughout the oceanic zones, beginning at the surface and traveling to the deep. The concept map-like connections encourage students to link the abiotic and biotic interactions within the oceanic food web.

In this activity, student teams research and develop a proposal to decrease the carbon footprint of their city's/town's public transportation system and then prepare a report that explains why their transportation plan is the best for their community.

This interactive/applet allows the user to explore the potential increase in carbon emissions over the next 50 years, subject to modifications made by the user in various technologies that impact carbon output. Part of the Visualizing and Understanding the Science of Climate Change module.

This visualization shows in five steps how ice cores provide a measure of the temperature in the past.

This audio slideshow/video describes the Greenland ice sheet and the difficulties in getting scientific measurements at the interface between the ice and the ocean. It features the work of a researcher from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute researcher. She gives a personal account of her work on the recent increase in melting of glaciers, the challenges of working in Greenland, and the reasons why so many climate scientists are looking there for answers to questions about climate change.

This is an excellent interactive simulation of the earth moving around the sun.

Students act out 4 different molecules (nitrogen, oxygen, carbon dioxide and water vapor) to discover which ones are greenhouse gases and which ones are not.

In this resource, students learn about changes in water availability due to drought in California from 2013 to 2017. This resource provides opportunities for students to interpret data and analyze imagery for observational evidence of drought conditions through maps, satellite images, and photographs.

This resource is an informational video about the impact of climate change on the Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica.