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.

Students model Earth's tectonic plate movement and explore the relationship between these movements and different types of volcanoes.

Review this page to learn about the background of volcanoes and their eruptions.

Students will describe the changes in a newly-formed volcanic island over the first three years of its life.  

Global Phytoplankton Distribution Story Map

Students examine satellite images of an island before and after a volcanic eruption to determine the impact of the eruption.

Students analyze the relationship between sea surface height and ocean surface currents by graphing sea height using satellite data.  Note: This lesson is modified from NASA's TOPEX/Poseidon lesson plan.

This learning activity uses data acquired by the TOPEX/Poseidon altimeter, a joint project of NASA and the French Space Agency, to investigate the relationship between the topography of a sea-floor feature and the topography of the overlying sea surface.

Students can interact with NASA data to build a custom visualizations of local, regional, or global plant growth patterns over time, using the Earth System Data Explorer to generate plots of satellite data as they develop models of this phenomenon.

This story map lesson plan allows students to explore global phytoplankton distribution using chlorophyll concentration data in a 5 E-learning cycle. Students will investigate the processes that allow phytoplankton populations to thrive, as well as how their role in the carbon cycle impacts the other spheres of the Earth System.