NASA has just launched its International Polar Year (IPY) Resource Page for teachers, at this link.
In addition to the latest science research on the Arctic and Antarctic, this handy learning resource also covers the polar regions of the moon and Mars. Classroom materials include easy-to-use and searchable databases of video, images, posters, and fact sheets. Educators can also use lessons, educational tools and datasets, reading materials, podcasts and vodcasts, curriculum-based science games and a calendar of International Polar Year events. Or one can chill with the world’s foremost ice and climate scientists at the Polar Palooza section of the NASA IPY website.
The International Polar Year, initiated in March of 2007, consists of more than 63 cooperating countries working to improve scientific understanding of the polar regions of Earth, the moon and Mars.
So what’s the story with the interesting picture?
That’s renowned Earth scientist Richard Alley of Penn State University. He looks shaken but not stirred.
Haha, he looks happier than I think I’d be if I were laying in ice. Where is he, the Arctic? Was he doing some experiment or just trying to get an interesting pic? This pic gives me brain freeze just looking at it. Brrrrrr!
I don’t know the story behind why Dr. Alley decided to take an ice bath.
But I do know that strange things can happen on the polar landscape, as evidenced by the statue pictured above and photographed by astronomer William Holzapfel of Berkeley during his study of cosmic microwave background radiation in the Antarctic.
And don’t forget that there is a great new National Geographic film called “Arctic Tale”:http://www.arctictalemovie.com/
I got to visit Antarctica in the early 1990s with as a “visiting journalist” for the National Science Foundation. And at the South Pole, while I was there in summer, it was something like 20 below. I took a stroll outside the geodesic dome that houses the science unit there, to see the marker at the South Pole itself … venturing out with one of the scientists … and I remember that my host’s mustache froze, complete with icicles, within minutes!
That was summer at the South Pole.
Deborah