The information on this site indicates that the life cycle of a glacier is more eventful than it appears. The site allows students to follow the journey of a single snowflake as it takes a ride through a glacier, a process that can take as much as 30,000 years to complete. It can be viewed as an interactive slide show or a single page of text and illustrations. Full description.

Wilson Alwyn Bentley (1865-1931), famous for his photomicrographs of snow crystals, prepared sets of glass lantern slides of dew, frost and ice crystals. He obtained thousands of photomicrographs of individual ice crystals over the course of his lifetime. Images in this collection are scanned from glass lantern slides. Most snow crystals found in nature will fit into one of these seven main categories: ... Full description.

In this article, The Why Files examines the possible finding of water ice on our Moon, and the implications for this discovery. The article discusses why scientists believe there is water on the Moon, how a neutron spectrometer picks up the unusual presence of hydrogen on the Moon which could indicate water, what scientists hope to use this water for, and where this water may have come from. A moon ... Full description.

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.

The National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) is an information and referral center supporting polar and cryospheric research. Through its Data Catalog, NSIDC archives and distributes digital and analog data on snow cover, avalanches, glaciers, ice sheets, freshwater ice, sea ice, ground ice, permafrost, atmospheric ice, paleoglaciology, and ice cores. Users may browse their entire data collection ... Full description.

This lesson plan is part of the DiscoverySchool.com lesson plan library for grades 6-8. It focuses on glaciers and icebergs, specifically, glacial scraping and landforms left behind by glaciers, and information about icebergs in the oceans. Students do a lab simulating glacial scouring. It includes objectives, materials, procedures, discussion questions, evaluation ideas, extensions, suggested readings, ... Full description.

This lesson plan is part of the Center for Educational Resources (CERES), a series of web-based astronomy lessons created by a team of master teachers, university faculty, and NASA researchers. Students download NASA Hubble Space Telescope (HST) images of the Martian polar ice caps from different times to measure and compare the changing Martian and Earth poles. This lesson contains expected outcomes ... Full description.

This six-day unit has students investigate the challenges of living and working in Antarctica and how researchers prepare for them, and then evaluate the insulating properties of a variety of fabrics, collecting their findings in a portfolio. The comprehensive curriculum materials at this site include an online activity in which students review the preparation materials given to researchers before ... Full description.

The Gulf of Maine Aquarium hosts this two-part activity. The focus is on seasonal changes in the mass balance of the Antarctic Ice Sheet. Part 1 uses an atlas and satellite imagery to examine the geography of the region and the changing boundaries of the ice sheet. Part 2 tracks annual changes in sea ice. There is an animation page showing changes in ice cover around Antarctica during 1991, and links ... Full description.

This series of activities demonstrates some effects of rising levels of greenhouse gases on climate. Specifically, it shows how an increase of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere raises temperatures; higher temperatures affect the water cycle, and rising sea levels could affect coastal areas as a result of glacial and polar ice melt. Although these activities are designed to teach specific skills ... Full description.