FROZEN IN TIME: A HANDS-ON ICE CORE, POLLEN, AND CLIMATE CHANGE LESSON PLAN FOR MIDDLE SCHOOL, HIGH SCHOOL, AND INTRODUCTORY COLLEGE CLASSES

Ice cores are one of the best ways for paleoclimatologists to reconstruct past climates. These tubes of ice, collected from the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets and mountain glaciers, are formed through the annual buildup of snow layers. The physical properties of the ice, as well as the materials trapped in the ice such as dust, pollen, and volcanic ash, can be analyzed in order to reconstruct climate over the age range of the core. Ice core proxy records and chronologies remain the standard in the paleoclimatology community to which all other climate proxy records are compared. Therefore, it is imperative that K-12 and university students are exposed to the basics behind these studies. However, the cost of acquisition, difficulties in transportation and/or storage, etc. make this concept challenging to incorporate hands-on lessons in a classroom or laboratory setting.

Here we present a hands-on ice core, pollen, and climate change activity that can be easily adopted and incorporated into several different formal and informal educational settings. This activity introduces students to the basics of ice core chronology by analyzing ice cores, which are modeled using stackable containers containing a number of different colored beads to represent various species of pollen. The ratio of the pollen types in each time interval is proportional to the percentages calculated in the actual ice core. By inventorying the amount of pollen in each age interval and analyzing the downcore trends, students are able to formulate an argument of past climate change based on real scientific evidence.

This activity was originally developed for introductory college courses as part of the program requirements for the 2017 Dartmouth School of Ice (SOI) program. Content from the SOI agenda and from Stapleton et al., 2017 was modified to incorporate an actual ice core pollen record (Reese et al., 2013). Additional adjustments were made to align the activity with the Next Generation Science Standards and middle and high school curricula as part of the PolarTREC 2018 program. Further studies on the effectiveness of this activity are planned and all materials are available upon request.