This activity is one of a series in the collection, The Potential Consequences of Climate Variability and Change activities.
Educational Resources - Search Tool
Civil engineers design, develop, and construct community projects that serve the general public such as roads, bridges, damns, tunnels, water supply systems, etc. The designs include but are not limited to many fields such as hydraulics, thermodynamics, or nuclear physics.
Sea Level Scientists are also known by several other names (marine geologist, paleoceanographer, paleoclimatologist, etc.). These professionals use natural records from the past to characterize local, regional, and global environments.
Geospatial Information Scientists and Technologists research geospatial data or develop geospatial technologies. Geospatial data is data that has a geographic component associated with it, such as coordinates or an address, and geospatial technologies are the technologies used to collect and analyze geospatial data.
Check out this interactive data visualization and simulation tool. It explores the impact of collapsing polar ice sheets (Greenland and Antarctica) and their impact on global mean sea level rise, along with shrinkage in the livable area around the world.
In this lesson, students will investigate the drivers of climate change, including adding carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, sea level rise, and the effect of decreasing sea ice on temperatures.
This activity invites students to model and observe the effect of melting ice sheets (from land) on sea level and the difference between the effect of melting sea-ice to that of melting land ice on sea level.
This mini lesson helps students visualize how the Hydrosphere and Cryosphere interact to produce changes in land and sea ice.
Students are divided into three different groups and are assigned a category of drivers of change in regional trends of freshwater storage (Climate Change, Human Activity, and Natural Variability).
Steve Nerem is the leader of NASA’s Sea Level Change team. His project, Observation-Driven Projections of Future Regional Sea Level Change, focuses on using NASA satellite and in situ observations and climate modeling to estimate future regional sea level change.