Explore the Frozen Continent
This is a five-part curriculum about Antarctic environmental processes and building connections between ice shelves, surface melt, climate change - and penguins!
Lesson 1 (What do we already know, or think we know, about climate & Antarctica?) of this sequence allows students to start exploring Antarctic ice and melt features and vocabulary with satellite imagery.
Lesson 2 (How does the changing climate impact the penguins around Antarctica?) lets students learn about penguins and how their populations are changing because of climate change.
In Lesson 3 (Antarctic Life & Albedo) students learn about the importance of albedo (or reflectivity) — and how penguin colonies may be mapped using satellites. In Lesson 4 (Why does the ice melt on the “Frozen Continent”?), students begin with hypotheses and use different datasets to confirm or disprove their ideas about what leads to ice melting on the “frozen continent.” And finally, Lesson 5 (Human Impacts on Climate Change: What will happen and what can we do about it?) explores possible impacts that human activities will continue to have on Antarctic ice in the future, ending with a discussion of how humans cause climate change and what humans can do to stop/reverse these effects.
