This site describes snow crystals and snowflakes. Although a common meteorological phenomenon, snow crystal growth is a fascinating and poorly understood process, in which remarkably complex and beautifully symmetric structures appear, quite literally, out of thin air. The many facets of snow crystals are described here, along with the attempts to understand their formation. Site highlights include ... Full description.

This on-line expedition focuses on the flow of ocean water along with its climatic impact and environmental consequences. Learning objectives include an awareness that ocean waters are constantly on the move, that ocean currents influence climate and living conditions for plants and animals, even on land, and that currents flow in complex patterns affected by wind, the water's salinity and heat content, ... Full description.

In this lesson plan students will learn the basics about how tornadoes are formed, and where and when they are most likely to occur. They will then study the current research on tornadoes and explore how scientists are trying to predict them. They will learn about the equipment storm chasers use to study tornadoes and will develop their own research plans. Full description.

The New Millennium Observatory (NeMO) is a seafloor observatory off the coast of Oregon, which studies the relationships between submarine volcanic events and the chemistry and distribution of hydrothermal vents and the biologic communities that depend on them. The research activities at NeMO provide an extraordinary educational opportunity, both from the daily reports from expeditions at sea and ... Full description.

This site allows teachers to use data from ocean drifting buoys to integrate ocean science into their classroom science and math instruction. It offers educational activities and curriculum materials developed and tested by teachers. Lesson plans on currents, moving water, building and tracking drifters are also available. Alternatively, educators may opt to use only the data, background information ... Full description.

This project aims to reconcile the international stratigraphic standards with many of the regional and archaic naming schemes that appear in the literature. In the process, the most recent International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS) time scale has been combined with information on the estimated placement and length of other stages in order to put approximate dates on all of the stratigraphic intervals ... Full description.

This applet provides practice in contour drawing using real-time data plots. There are six colors for drawing isolines and a button for erasing the last line. There is also a link to other contour analysis exercises. Full description.

In this lesson, each student team has an envelope containing a series of bank checks. A few are removed at a time, and the team attempts to construct a plausible scenario which involves those checks. With each subsequent removal of checks, appropriate revision of the scenario is done. Final scenarios are compared by the class. Class discussion is designed to show how human values and biases influence ... Full description.

In this lesson students working in teams classify furniture, share their categories and rationales, then note how their different schemes vary arbitrarily. They then see how living organisms are classified, and note how these groupings are natural, nearly always reflecting the same ancestral relationships in nested hierarchies, regardless of the deeper criteria. Such patterns are revealed with a look ... Full description.

This introduction to the labeling of points on a plane by their Cartesian coordinates can optionally be extended to coordinates in 3-dimensional space, to plane polar coordinates and to 3-dimensional polar coordinates. Students should learn to use Cartesian coordinates (x,y) for defining the position of a point in two dimensions and to use Cartesian coordinates (x,y,z) in 3-dimensional space and learn ... Full description.