Education

When the U.S. Ice Drilling Program Office was in need of a host site for its new "School of Ice" professional development workshop last June, Denver's National Ice Core Laboratory was a natural choice.

To the casual observer, mid-June may not seem like the ideal time to explore the science of ancient ice. However, last month, as the hot sun beat down outside, a dozen geoscience professors donned boots and thick red parkas to brave sub-zero freezers and learn the secrets embedded in ice many thousands of years old, from the coldest places on Earth.

Essentially, it goes something like this. The story of our world is written in snow. Or more specifically in the layers of deposited snow that fall each year in the high and cold places of the planet, which eventually compact into ice and form glaciers.

When I applied to the PolarTREC program, I was asked where I would prefer to go given the options of the Arctic, Antarctica, or either.

Each year, a new Girls on Ice team spends eight days exploring glaciated Mt. Baker in Washington State guided by myself, mountaineer Cecelia Mortonson, and a third (rotating) instructor. The nine teenage girls on the team learn not only about alpine geology, glaciology, and mountaineering, but they also challenge themselves and gain self-confidence in their physical, intellectual, and social abilities.

It's not every day that an actual segment of the GISP2 core from Summit, Greenland, goes on the road to excite and inform the public about polar research and the current IPY, but that's just what happened in March 2008, as POLAR-PALOOZA kicked off its continuing tour of more than 20 communities across America with a series of events at the National Geographic Society in Washington DC

Under the auspices of the Greenland-Denmark-United States Joint Committee, the Nordic/ Baltic Environment Science & Technology Hub—based out of the U.S. Embassy Copenhagen—sponsored a unique Arctic science trip for Danish, Greenlandic, and U.S. high school science students and teachers to Greenland's inland ice sheet.

POLAR-PALOOZA, an innovative public education and outreach initiative supported by both NSF and NASA, successfully presented a special “sneak preview” of its national tour: “Stories from a Changing Planet”, on Saturday October 13th at ASTC 2007--the annual conference of the Association of Science-Technology Centers.

The International Polar Year 2007–2008 will be the largest internationally coordinated research program in 50 years. It will be an intensive period of interdisciplinary science focused on the Arctic and the Antarctic.