As much of the East Coast and the Midwest experience high temperatures, you can cool off web-based sites with photos, video segments, classroom ideas for next year, and news from the Arctic and Antarctica.

Ice Stories: Tales from the Arctic and Antarctic, an interactive web-based project of San Francisco’s Exploratorium, showcases scientists’ fieldwork through webcasts, feature stories, polar news, and videos. It includes a live webcam feed from McMurdo Station in Antarctica. Ice Stories was produced as part of the 2007-2008 International Polar Year. The National Science Foundation provided funding for the project, including cameras and blogging tools to document scientific work in the polar regions.

At The Great Beyond, a blog of the journal Nature, you can follow freelance science writer Wendee Holtcamp’s current experiences with a research project in the Bering Sea. She’s accompanying 29 scientists, graduate students and technicians aboard the RV Thomas G. Thompson, a National Science Foundation (NSF) research vessel.

Holtcamp photographs as well as writes about the daily work of the researchers and conditions on the sea. The Bering Sea Project, a partnership between NSF and Alaska’s North Pacific Research Board, is now in its fourth year. Its mission is to understand the mechanisms that sustain the ecosystem of this highly productive region. Researchers will link climate, oceanography, plankton, fishes, seabirds, marine mammals, humans, traditional knowledge, and economic outcomes. Fisheries in this area are globally important. About 50 per cent of commercially caught seafood consumed in the United States comes from the Bering Sea.

Video journalist Mary Lynn Price produces the web site Women Working in Antarctica. She gives video portraits of biologists, ecologists, conservators of historic sites, a snowmobile instructor and mechanic, and a middle school science teacher, Shakira Brown-Petit.

You can find many photographs of the polar regions in the Photo Gallery of Beyond Penguins and Polar Bears. The photos are grouped by the topics of the issues of the online magazine for K-5 teachers–seasons, rocks and minerals, climate, birds, mammals, and more. They can be searched by keywords also. The magazine’s monthly Virtual Bookshelf column recommends children’s books with polar-related content, including fiction, nonfiction, picture books, and poetry. Each issue also contains ideas for linking literacy and science as students learn about the polar regions.