Cold Curriculum for a Hot Topic

https://eos.org/articles/cold-curriculum-for-a-hot-topic

Source: By Nancy Averett, Eos/AGU. 

Excerpt: educators at the Byrd Polar and Climate Research Center do more than just talk about ice cores and what they reveal about temperature, precipitation, and climate: The scientists also help students create their own ice cores—using Pringles potato chip cans filled with layers of frozen water, instant coffee, and other materials to represent the different layers found in the ice. “If you haven’t seen an ice core and looked at what patterns are there, it’s really hard to just jump to the data and have a deeper meaning of what [they’re] telling you or how [they connect] to the core,” said Jason Cervenec, education and outreach director at the Center, which is on the campus of Ohio State University (OSU) in Columbus. Every year, Cervenec and his staff host thousands of kindergarten to 12th-grade students to teach them about ice cores and the secrets they hold. A handful of other facilities do similar educational outreach, including the National Science Foundation Ice Core Facility in Denver and the Climate Change Institute at the University of Maine in Orono. ...Cervenec said his group tries to make it easy for educators to teach about a variety of complex topics, including climate change. Ice core records allow scientists to reconstruct and compare past climates and their fluctuations, as well as show that Earth’s current warming pattern is an anomaly. A timeline graph at the Center, for example, connects proxy data found in an ice core with world events so students can see how warming fluctuations have become much more severe since the Industrial Revolution....