Man-made pollutants in the atmosphere have contributed to ozone level depletion at the rate of 0.3% per year globally, culminating in the record loss of 40 million tones in 2006, according to ESA’s Envisat satellite. Currently 28 million square km with a depth of 100 Dobson units, the ozone, which serves as a protective layer that shields the Earth from ultraviolet rays, is predicted to make a recovery from the banned chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) that break down its molecules in 2060.
Concurrently, global warming is thought to be the catalyst for the significant shrinkage of Greenland’s ice sheet as well as ice melt in the Artic Sea. In the same year the ozone is slated to recover from its depletion, the Artic Sea will have experienced total ice loss if global warming trends continue, while satellite data from the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) reveals that Greenland’s ice sheet is losing between 52 and 63 cubic miles of mass per year. Ice loss in both instances will have severe ecological ramifications. For more information, please visit the following NSDL resources:
Ozone Layer Shielding Our Planet
An animation from the NASA GSFC Scientific Visualization Studio that depicts the ozone layer shielding Earth from ultraviolet radiation.
Grade Level: Undergraduate, Graduate, Professional
Global Warming
http://yosemite.epa.gov/oar/globalwarming.nsf/content/index.html
An EPA website dedicated to understanding global warming and its impacts.
Grade Level: Undergraduate
Sea Ice, an Antarctic Habitat
http://www.awi-bremerhave n.de/Eistour/index-e.html
Hosted by the Alfred Wegener Institute Foundation for Polar and Marine Research (AWI), this site explores the formation and composition of sea ice, its ecological significance, the research behind the phenomenon and the effects of sea ice loss on the habitat.
Grade Level: Pre-K to 12, Postsecondary
Studies Greenland ice mass are part of a great scientific debate over the human role, if any, in global warming and climate change. This historic debate is a wonderful opportunity to give students an insight into the central role of scientific debate in scientific method.
An excellent source of the skeptical side of the debate is here:
http://www.co2science.org It features high school level summaries of hundreds of peer reviewed scientific articles, with a good subject index. For example:
Greenland temperature history:
http://www.co2science.org/scripts/CO2ScienceB2C/subject/g/greenland.jsp
Greenland ice sheets:
ttp://www.co2science.org/scripts/CO2ScienceB2C/subject/i/icesheetgreen.jsp
Greenland is especially interesting because it actually was green 1,000 years ago, when temperatures were much higher than today.
The authoritative source for the theory of human-induced warming is the IPCC reports: http://www.ipcc.ch
The lead science report is here:
http://www.grida.no/climate/ipcc_tar/wg1/index.htm
Unfortunately it is from 2001, but a new report is due early next year.
[…] This week NSDL’s blogosphere features a comment to the News Topic Center post: 2006 Heralded Record Loss of Ozone and Substantial Ice Shrinkage that questions the human role in global warming and climate change and suggests resources on the other side of “This historic debate (which) is a wonderful opportunity to give students an insight into the central role of scientific debate in scientific method.” […]