Lynn Simarski
Eight high school teachers will head to Antarctica and the Arctic over the next year to team up with research teams in the field.
Five teachers will go south and three north under the National Science Foundation's Teachers Experiencing the Antarctic/Arctic (TEA) Program.
The teachers visited the polar researchers at the research teams' home universities for training on their specific research projects. The educators have already joined or will soon join the teams in the field on a wide range of studies.
One teacher will ride an icebreaker exploring the deglaciation history of Antarctica's Ross Sea, while another will monitor stream flow at a Long-Term Ecological Research Site in the Transantarctic Mountains. Another will assist in drilling ice cores in Antarctica, used to study climate change. A teacher in Alaska has already studied aquatic ecology at Toolik Lake. The teachers will keep electronic journals of their experiences and answer students' e-mail questions. This year, participating teachers come from Texas, New York, Indiana, Iowa, New Jersey, Tennessee, Wisconsin and Montana.