Students will use NASA satellite data to study temperature and snow-ice coverage in the South Beaufort Sea, Alaska. The data can be used to correlate with USGS ground tracking of polar bears, and to relate this to global change, sea ice changes, and polar bear migration. The data can be used to draw conclusions surrounding any migration patterns in the region. Full description.

This website explores the sentinels of climate change with a 3D interactive global ice viewer. View the effects of climate change on glaciers, sea ice, and continental ice sheets worldwide, in Greenland, Arctic and Antarctica through time lapse movies of ice melt and trends, comparison photographs and maps. Links to NASA satellites and their missions are provided. Full description.

This interactive resource portrays what might happen to world coastlines if entire sections of the Antarctic Ice Sheet were to melt. Viewers can see how much land area might be flooded by a relatively modest 17-foot rise in sea level (represented by the collapse of the Western Antarctic Ice Sheet), or a more severe 170-foot rise, represented by the collapse of the Eastern Antarctic Ice Sheet. By comparing ... Full description.

In this lesson, learners use WebImage, a Web-based customized version of ImageJ, to investigate changes in snow cover and sea ice in the Northern Hemisphere over a period of 24 years. The images are obtained from satellite measurements of visible and microwave radiation. The lesson follows from Snow and Ice: A Hemispherical View. Full description.

After Antarctica, Greenland's ice cap contains the second largest mass of frozen fresh water in the world. Based on new research using NASA's airborne laser altimeter, scientists have identified pronounced thinning of Greenland's ice cap. This new research indicates enough ice loss to cause a measurable rise in sea levels. This site, produced by NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio, features text, ... Full description.

This animation shows the retreat of glacial ice, changes in the shoreline, and the disappearance of the land bridge across the Bering Sea which occurred at the end of the last ice age, beginning just over 21,000 years ago. 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.

C-19 iceberg that calved off the Ross Ice shelf and its companion B-15 iceberg, which is anchored near the coast. The two large bergs may have disrupted normal ocean circulation that clears the Ross Sea of seasonal ice during the first months of austral summer. The ice remained in the sea long past previous thaw dates, and created trouble for ships trying to bring in supplies to McMurdo research station ... Full description.

This radio broadcast considers the possibility that the current Ice Age was triggered when Panama rose up out of the sea to join North and South America, thereby separating the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. There is an explanation of how this affected, in turn, the oceans, the Arctic, and ultimately the entire planet. The clip is 2 minutes in length. Full description.

Part of the ongoing research into polar ice trends encompasses evaluation from sophisticated computer models. At the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory at Princeton University, run by NASAs sibling agency, NOAA, researchers modeled a 5,000 year period to see how polar ice might behave over time depending on several different variables. This visualization shows a 120-year slice of that complete ... Full description.