Members of the Scripps GOLF 1-8-2 Team  (Julie Bowles, Hubert Staudigel, and Elise Sbarbori) are currently braving the elements (extreme cold, wind and maybe snow fall) in order to collect samples of volcanic rocks from the McMurdo area in Antarctica. By studying these igneous rocks, they hope to view a “snapshot” of what the Earth’s magnetic field looked like in the particular time and place the rocks were formed.

Below are some excerpts from their diary:

Day 22 – 5 December 2006 – Sea Ice Blowout
The sea ice will be breaking up soon (we’ve seen it get progressively slushier and progressively more cracked with each day that we’ve been out). Luckily we are through with our sampling of Erebus Bay. Twelve sites. Not bad! Now we’re keeping our fingers crossed that the sea ice recedes past Hut Point (it hasn’t in the past 7 years). If McMurdo Station becomes waterfront property, we may be able to see killer whales from our laboratory window!

Day 20 – 3 December 2006 – Skua: 2, Julie: 0
You’d think she’d have learned her lesson the first time around. This time the bird took a ham sandwich and Julie’s left pinky finger. Kidding, kidding. We’ve been extremely wary since the first skua incident, and opt to eat lunch in a warming hut instead of in the open air. Sites taken today include Little Razorback and Tent Island.

Day 19 – 2 December 2006 – Keeping Warm, Antarctica Style
Vicious winds today! With speeds as high as 20 knots this is probably the windiest weather we’ve seen so far, but at least it gives us the chance to fully utilize every last piece of our extreme cold weather gear on the snowmobile ride home. In spite of the cold, we manage to sample Big Razorback Island and explore Tent Island for good outcrop. Unrecognizable as human beings, looking more like piles of laundry, we navigate the sea ice, making sure to stop at the “warming huts” along the way to defrost our fingers and toes.

Day 18 – 1 December 2006 – Skua: 1, Julie: 0
Julie has a very “Hitchcockian” incident this morning while returning from the galley. In a scene that could be straight out of The Birds, Julie is attacked by a vicious skua, determined to free her from her buttered toast! Despite her best efforts to thwart the feathered beast, she steps away from the scene absent one continental breakfast. Fieldwork today includes revisiting the dike near Turks Head to finish orienting our samples as well as sampling Turks Head itself. The slush ponds deepen as the tide comes in, so we have to wade through water in order to make it home!

Earth scientists go into the field to study geological structures and to sample rocks for further analyses. They visit interesting and remote places all around the globe, on the continents, but also on the oceans. The ERESE website follows these expeditions online by dedicating a special web page. These eFieldwork pages are maintained live and allow you to follow the science team in all aspects of their field campaigns. Your class room can iChat and have video conferences with the scientists in the field. They also can download reports, video footage and lots of images.

Examples:
ALIA Expedition around the Samoan Hotspot (April 2005)
Hawaiian Volcanoes Field Trip (September 2005)
GOLF182 Antarctica Expedition (Currently Underway)

We like to know in what ways you would like to participate with your class room? How can we make these eFieldwork pages a better resource for you?

There are many research institutions in the United States, together hosting thousands of researchers that make it their daily business to create and analyze a mountain of data. The Scripps Institution of Oceanography is one such institutions and is a great resource of interesting research data, in particular, on the topic of plate tectonics. The key question is: how do teachers, students and other researchers outside Scripps find these data and can make use of them? The simple answer would be that it is very hard to find these data on the world wide web, lets stand to make any good use of it. For that reason, we started ERESE (Enduring Resources for Earth Science Education) which is a NSDL sponsored effort to harvest the richness in the Scripps data archives and distill it down to make it useful in the class room and for users outside research. What kind of data would you like to use in your classroom? In which format would you like to get this material? How should it be presented to you on the ERESE website?