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Education: Student Outcomes |
Filtered by outcome, asset type: 9-12q6, video Click here to begin a new search | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Outcome: Explain how climate variations can induce changes in the global ocean circulation. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Grade level: 9-12 Theme: climate Video: keeping_up_carbon_03.flv
Researchers are learning that future climate change will depend on carbon levels in the land, in the atmosphere, and in the sea, and how these levels respond to human disturbance. About one-third of all human-generated carbon emissions has dissolved into the ocean. More than 80% of Earth's added heat is now stored in the ocean. Scott Doney: "In the future, as the planet gets warmer, the water's going to warm up, and warm water can hold less carbon than cold water - the other thing is, on a warmer planet, some of the currents are going to slow down, so we might not be forming as much of this cold deep water. So we won't be able to transport carbon into the deep sea. So on the whole, the ocean's going to become less effective at removing carbon from the atmosphere." (source) Grade level: 9-12 Theme: climate Video: keeping_up_carbon_04.flv
Stacey Boland: "As the ocean absorbs more carbon dioxide, it becomes more acidic, and this can be a threat to some of the organisms that live inside the ocean." As Earth's climate continues to change, how will researchers monitor something as big as the ocean, and something as complex as the carbon cycle? NASA Earth observing satellites give scientists the "big picture" view of our home planet. Varied satellites help researchers detect changes in ocean climate and ecology over time, providing vital insight into the health of our home planet. (source) Grade level: 9-12 Theme: climate Video: melting_ice_03.flv
Lora Koenig: "Even though the polar regions seem very far from a lot of people's day to day life, they are very important. Because they are regions that cool our earth. And as they change, they're going to cause larger changes throughout the rest of the globe." (source) Grade level: 9-12 Theme: climate Video: melting_ice_02.flv
Lora Koenig: "What we're seeing right now on the ice sheets and glaciers is that they are shrinking in size. And as glaciers on land are shrinking overall, that contributes a little bit to sea level rise. And we are worried that as we see warming over the ice sheets, and increased melting over the ice sheets, that they are going to start contributing much more to sea level rise." (source) Grade level: 9-12 Theme: climate Video: melting_ice_04.flv
Josh Willis: "As the great ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland begin to melt and break up due to global warming, we really might experience very rapid sea level rise; three or four times as fast as the rate that we see today. So predicting this rate out into the future is very tricky because we really don't know when the ice sheets might break up and how fast they will when they do. So predicting future sea level rise is one of the great scientific problems of the future." (source) |