Module 8 - The Cryosphere

Explain:
With two modules on the cryosphere I found that I needed a better understanding of what the cryosphere was.  Wikipedia to the rescue.  I hadn't realized that the cryosphere included all frozen water - not just sea ice and glaciers, but it included snow, lake and river ice, and permafrost.  The cryosphere is a lot of water.  And some of that water has been locked up as ice for a long time - up to one million years.  And that locked up in the ice is a considerable amount of carbon dioxide and methane - powerful members of the greenhouse gas gang. 

As I was watching the TD videos, I began to make some interesting connections.  The Earth's Cryosphere video was very helpful.  The connection between increased sea temperatures leading to increased sea ice melting leading to less global cooling leading to more permafrost melting leading to the release of more carbon and methane that had been captured for hundreds of thousands of years is terrifying, and another great example of a perfect feedback loop.


Extend:
This module has a lot of possible teaching opportunities - especially as the cryosphere around Tununak is rapidly growing at the moment.  In fact, I was just asked to go cryo-fishing.  Okay, I'm not sure if that's grammatically correct, but the opportunity was not available to me a few weeks ago, so it supports my "cryosphere is growing" claim.

This is also an area where my students can teach me a lot about the cryosphere.  They have intimate knowledge of the sea ice of the past decade and their relatives over the past decades.  Talking to them it seems that the snow fall is in the biggest flux.  Snow has come later, left earlier, and been less as a general observation.

It may not happen this year, as we just covered the topic, but the shrinking sea ice offers a wonderful data set for finding a line of regression and to make some meaningful predictions based on the found equation.  Algebra II - so helpful in real life.  It sure beats the cost per square foot of office space example in the book.

I will be teaching Government next semester and so have been making a collection of interesting things to talk about this spring.  The 2009 Indigenous Peoples' Global Summit on Climate Change and the declaration were intriguing examples of citizenship in rural areas of the globe.  In such a small, isolated community, making connections to the larger world is very important, and this document ties together a number of indigenous communities from around the world.

Evaluate:
This module was important to me in a few ways.

The first way was that it provided more fuel for my campaign against climate change deniers.  I can't decide what worries me more - climate change or the attitude that it isn't happening and that scientists are lying to them.  I feel that the more information out there in easy to digest formats (like the graph of shrinking sea ice).

That image is from the National Snow and Ice Data Center's website.  It offers a considerable amount of interesting information.

I also think that this module is meaningful to my students.  I will be leaving Alaska sometime in the future to head back to the lower 48.  My students, in most cases, will not.  They will be the ones adapting to living in a world with a dramatically different cryosphere than the one we live in now unless things take an incredible turn in the very near future.  They will benefit from understanding the nuts and bolts of how these things work.

Three Colleagues:
Three colleagues this week...

• Tyler's Alaskanwisdom blog was a nice read.  Of particular interest was his metaphor for a positive feedback loop:  a snowball rolling down a hill...picking up more snow and more speed as it goes.  A wonderful, appropriate example.  
• Next stop:  Chena Lakes Farm's blog.  On the blog was an interesting discussion about how forest fires distribute ash and soot to surrounding snow covered areas, affecting the areas albedo, thus increasing melt rates.  Snowball to start the positive feedback loop less, then apply that knowledge to this example.
• Last stop:  Matthew's Alaskan Knowledge blog.  Matthew discussed some examples of humans using properties of albedo to manipulate their environment - one example in farmers covering the ground with black plastic to warm the ground in the early spring, and one of scientists wrapping glaciers in white plastic to reflect more of the sun's energy hoping to reduce melting.