This USGS activity leads students to an understanding of what remote sensing means and how researchers use it to study changes to the Earth’s surface, such as deforestation.
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In addition to the changes brought about by natural forces, it has recently become apparent that a relative newcomer to planet Earth — the human being — has become a powerful agent of environmental change.
What is El Nino or ENSO?
Background information on sea and land ice melt.
In this activity, you will use an inexpensive spectrophotometer* to test how light at different visible wavelengths (blue, green, red) is transmitted, or absorbed, through four different colored water samples.
This lesson is taken from NASA's Phytopia: Discovery of the Marine Ecosystem written in partnership with Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Science with funding from the National Science Foundation.
In this lesson, students investigate and identify various phytoplankton using images that were previously taken with a compound microscope. Credit: This lesson is modified from a lesson of the same name created by The Center for Microbial Oceanography: Research and Education 
Students use Phytopia: Exploration of the Marine Ecosystem, a computer-based tool, to investigate various phytoplankton species and topics relating to phytoplankton biology.
To investigate the different rates of heating and cooling of certain materials on earth in order to understand the heating dynamics that take place in the Earth’s atmosphere.