Antarctic Penguins, Teaching the Science of Climate Change: A Celebration of IPY

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This project uses penguins to hook students into exploring how science investigates changes in Earths biota and climate. The project builds on a pilot effort, called Penguin Science, and will develop PowerPoint presentations, short video "webisodes," background reading material, and live and interactive website components to engage students in ongoing field research. Students, K-14, will be involved in climate-change research that will include ecology, sedimentology, paleontology, glaciology and oceanography. The project will use the amazingly popular Antarctic pack-ice penguins (Adelie and Emperor) to look at biotic responses to environmental change, and address the question: How do we know what we know? Activities include how the changing environment currently and over the previous 12,000 years has affected the population size and distribution of these creatures. The demography and ecology of Adelie and Emperor penguins appear to be particularly sensitive to changes in land-based and marine ice. The response of species to climate change is very complex and polar species are no exception: in some parts of Antarctica they are declining and in others increasing, both trends related to changing ice. However, these responses are well enough understood that ecologists, geologists, glaciologists and oceanographers have used the dated, sequential penguin occupancy of areas as one proxy for ice sheet retreat and advance, as well as changes in sea-ice persistence, during the Holocene. The patterns revealed by penguins corroborate the information from glacier and sediment cores. The project will compare these proxies (how the data are gathered, how they are analyzed, and what they mean) in a way that will be engaging to students.