Operation Ice Bridge

by Sci 5
Inspired by NASA Operation Ice Bridge, 5th Grade Science students have been designing original research, collecting and analyzing data. They will continue to share their research through this blog throughout the winter.

Our Operation Ice Bridge work continues...

Our testing rig: Vernier LabQuest with temperature and light intensity probes.

We are trying to learn about global warming and how it affects the polar ice caps. We are testing the albedo of different ground covers, including sand, snow, woodchips, grass, pavement, water, soil and ice. Albedo is the light that is reflected off of a surface. We are measuring albedo because we noticed that the air temperatures were different over different ground cover. We are trying to find out if the reason there are different temperatures is because there are different amounts of light reflected from surfaces. If there is a lot of reflected light, it might cause it to get warmer. If the snow and ice have such a high albedo, maybe that warms the air and adds to the melting of the polar ice. Because of global warming, the greenhouse gasses make it harder for the reflected heat to escape. The warm air gets trapped and melts the polar ice. We know from other work that cold air sinks. Could high albedo cause less melting? We are also wondering how the industrial countries in the Northern Hemisphere are affecting things. Are there more sources of greenhouse gasses in the Northern Hemisphere than in the Southern Hemisphere? Is there a difference in how the Arctic is being affected compared to the Antarctic?

Does albedo change the air temperature?
Does albedo change the melting rates of snow and ice?
Does albedo change as snow/ice melts?
Do different surface and air temperatures affect the albedo of snow/ice?

Maybe sand has such a high albedo because it is made of tiny crystals like snow and ice are... maybe snow (sparkly crushed up ice) works the same way... maybe it gets hot like sand does with the sun’s light...

Where do you like to do math?

by Math4

Where do you most enjoy working on mathematics? What kind of a space helps you think? When you're stuck on a problem, where do you go? What do you do to get un-stuck?

We asked this question of Marcus du Sautoy via twitter and here is his response:

Read the comments below to see our thoughts, AND please share your thoughts with us.

Operation Ice Bridge

by Sci5

We have been working on Operation Ice Bridge aka OIB. After following the NASA Airborne Sciences OIB missions over Antarctica,  we decided we would follow in NASA’S footsteps and do our own ice bridge study. We started by going outside and taking the icy and slushy snow temperatures we also took the temperatures of the soil, wood chips, grass and pond water. We also did an inside sort of control trial with regular freezer ice. 

We are are looking at what the conditions are like over ice. What happens when it's sunny or windy? What changes how ice melts?

We took temperatures of the air near the surface of the ground and at 1, 2, and 3 foot heights. We use a PVC pipe with holes through it to hold our temperature probes. We are also measuring the soil temperature. We've been looking at the data and trying to find patterns. One thing we noticed is that it's different over different kinds of ground cover. We are wondering if that has anything to do with how much light is reflected from the surface. We are planning to measure the reflected light and see if there are temperature differences with that.

Using LabQuest and Vernier Temperature Probes

While doing IceBridge work we learned many things. We have talked about how global warming has maybe done some things with the polar ice caps. We are trying to find ways to test this out. We learned a lot of side things also, like snow is so reflective from the sun because it has a lot of something called albedo. We learned that global warming is caused because our atmosphere is thickening. When the light and heat from the sun hit the ground/snow/Antarctica it bounces right back up and since the atmosphere has thickened, it gets trapped and stays. The role the humans have in this is WE are making the atmosphere thicker.

Our First Data

We have come up with some good hypotheses. We have done some good control tests and outside tests. Next we should go on to testing our hypotheses in the classroom. We should also do more outside trials and look more deeply for patterns. 

Follow our mission and share your comments.

It's A Heartbeat Away

by Math4
(Teacher's note: this group is practicing the multiplication algorithm, multiplying multi-digit factors and working with multi-step applications of the algorithm.)

We came into the room on Monday morning and our teacher had this up on the board:

We then all started asking questions and sharing ideas about what might make our hearts beat faster or slower.

• how many times does it beat in a minute?
• how do we know how fast it beats?
• it matters if you're exercising or still
• depends on what you're doing
• might matter what you're eating
• running beats fast
• depends how long you live
• health condition might affect
• months have different numbers of days
• leap years...
• does gravity matter?
• does mass/weight matter?
• does our heart slow down while sleeping?
• does fatigue or dehydration affect?
• does age matter?
• rate is always changing... need an estimate
• does height matter?
• get resting, then exercising, get an average... rate between the two
• everyone will have a different answer
• does respiration rate matter?

We wanted to figure out how many times our heart would beat in a minute while we were sitting down. We thought this might be a lower number of beats because when you’re exercising your heart beats faster. We called this our resting pulse. We used this to calculate how many times our heart would beat in an hour and then in a day. Then we tried jogging around to get our exercise rate.
This got us interested in how gravity might affect pulse rates and what the differences might be for someone on the International Space Station. We tweeted some questions to space to get some more information. 

We learned that Suni Williams has the record for female EVA time (50hrs 40min). We wondered how many times her heart beat during those EVAs. Our school nurse came and talked to us about how our hearts work, how it beats, why it beats and some of the different things that make it beat faster or slower. We learned that when you are excited, your heart beats faster. Since Suni was out it space, she was probably pretty excited and maybe nervous or even a bit scared, so her pulse rate might be like our exercise pulses. 

When we measured our own pulses, we found that everyone had different rates. We decided to “average” our data and use the pulse that was in the middle of the class data. Our teacher told us that is called the median. Our median resting pulse rate was 76 beats per minute and our median exercise rate was 106 beats per minute. We used the median exercise rate to find out that Suni’s heart beat about 322,240 times during all of her EVA time!

We also got curious about pulses of other animals. We asked ISS National Lab what the Medaka fish pulse was. We decided to give the Medaka fish 85 days mission, the same length as CMDR Hadfield’s mission. The Medaka have a pulse of 116 beats per minute. That means their heart would beat 14,198,400 times during that mission!

Read more about the Medaka fish on ISS.

We also figured out that our hearts would beat about 39,945,600 times in 2013!

This was a lot of fun. It was a great learning experience. It was cool to learn about how many times our heart beats. It was fun learning about what could affect your heart. 

Try these experiments out in your classroom and see what you find. Write us in the comments section and let us know what  you learn.

Sandy at Atlantic City

Analysis of data from Sandy as it moved toward Atlantic City, NJ on October 29, 2012 and then as it moved inland and away from Atlantic City on October 30th, 2012.

by Sci5

Graph 1: Air Temperature

We made several different graphs in TinkerPlots of the observations from the Atlantic City, NJ airport to try to figure out what happened in the storm.



Graph 1: As Sandy moves toward land, the air temperature gets warmer. At landfall, the air temperature peaks at about 17°C. As Sandy moves inland, the temperature cools. After Sandy, the air temperature is about 6°C.

This shows that Sandy was bringing warm air. The air was warmed because of the warm sea surface of the Atlantic, which was about 5°C warmer than usual for this time of year.

After Sandy, the wind was blowing from the South-West, bringing colder air into the area.

Graph 2: Wind Speed

Graph 2: As Sandy came closer to land, the winds increased. The winds peaked at about 40 mph. As the eye of the storm passed over Atlantic City, there was sudden drop in wind speed, down to about 10 mph. After about an hour, the winds quickly rose back to peak strength.

As Sandy moves inland and away from Atlantic City, the wind speeds drop significantly.

Graph 3: Air Pressure

Graph 3: As Sandy moves toward Atlantic City, the air pressure gets lower. As the air pressure gets lower, the storm gets stronger. The air pressure is at its lowest when the eye is passing over Atlantic City.

After landfall and Sandy is moving inland, the air pressure gets higher. As the air pressure increases, the storm gets weaker.

Graph 4: Wind Speed vs Air Pressure

Graph 4: If we look at wind speed and air pressure together, we see a diagonal line from upper left to lower right.

This means these two measurements must be connected.

As air pressure decreases, the wind speeds increase.

Tropical cyclones are stronger when there is lower air pressure. Areas of high air pressure cause the storms to get weaker.

Graph 5: Precipitation

Graph 5: There was not very much rain during this storm. It peaked at about 0.6 inch per hour.

The heaviest rains were as Sandy made landfall.

The air in front of Sandy had more moisture than the air behind Sandy.

Sandy caused warm, humid air to blow from off the Atlantic from the East as it approached. After Sandy left, colder, drier air blew in from off the land South-west of Atlantic City.

NASA IceBridge

	NASA ICE (@NASA_ICE)
11/21/12, 1:48 PM New story and video about #IceBridge mission over Recovery Glacier: Anatomy of an IceBridge Mission. go.nasa.gov/10uIcfE

Sci5: Analysis of Sandy

Sci5 is investigating data from JFK airport for October 29-30, 2012. The approach and departure of Superstorm Sandy.

The first graph we made was to look at the changes in air temperature over the course of Sandy at JFK airport.

We noticed that as Sandy approached, the air got warmer and then as Sandy departed the air got cooler. The temperature peaked at about 4:30 pm on 10/29 when Sandy was at its closest point to us.

At Mark Elliot's (of The Weather Channel) suggestion, we looked at the direction the winds were coming from and how they related to the temperature of the air.

As Sandy approached, it was pulling air from the NE. This air was coming from off the Atlantic Ocean and was warmer and more humid. As Sandy departed, the winds switched around to the SW, pulling dryer and colder air from inland.

Stay tuned for more analysis.