Climate News

From msnbc.com: View the story here.

New photographs taken of a vast glacier in northern Greenland have revealed the astonishing rate of its breakup, with one scientist saying he was rendered "speechless."

In August 2010, part of the Petermann Glacier about four times the size of Manhattan island broke off , prompting a hearing in Congress.

Researcher Alun Hubbard, of the Centre for Glaciology at Aberystwyth University, U.K., told msnbc.com by phone that another section, about twice the size of Manhattan, appeared close to breaking off.

In 2009, scientists installed GPS masts on the glacier to track its movement.
But when they returned in July this year, they found the ice had been melting so quickly — at an unexpected 16-and-a-half feet in two years — that some of the masts stuck into the glacier were no longer in position.

Hubbard, who has been working with Jason Box, of Ohio State University, and others, said in a statement issued by the Byrd Polar Research Center that scientists were still trying to work out how fast the glacier was moving and the effect on the ice sheet feeding the glacier.

'Really weird'

But he said he was taken aback by the difference between 2009 and 2011 when he visited the glacier in late July.

"Although I knew what to expect in terms of ice loss from satellite imagery, I was still completely unprepared for the gob-smacking scale of the break-up, which rendered me speechless," he said in the statement.

"I'm very familiar with the glacier. It's very hard to sort of envisage something so big not being there ... to come back and basically see an ice shelf has disappeared, which is 20 kilometers across (about 12 miles) ... I was speechless and started laughing because I couldn't sort of believe it," Hubbard added, speaking to msnbc.com.

"It was really weird when the helicopter first came over," he added.

Hubbard told msnbc.com that he had gone to the glacier to recover instruments used to monitor the glacier and time-lapse photographs.

"What I saw there is this ice shelf is riddled with rifts and cracks. You can see another big rift another 10 to 15 kilometers (6 to 9 miles) back into" the glacier, he said.

Hubbard said the large rift, which the researchers have dubbed "The Big Kahuna," was getting bigger. He was cautious about predicting when it would create a new vast ice island, but said it could happen "maybe next year, something like that."

'Abnormally warm'

He said while sea glacier's "calving" of ice bergs was a natural process, they were witnessing something out of the ordinary.

"The break-off last year is bigger than anything seen for at least 150 years," Hubbard said.

"This region (northern Greenland) is experiencing temperatures which are abnormally warm ... I think the far northwest of Greenland is seeing a kind of new regime of climate," he added.

The Humbolt Glacier, the widest in the northern hemisphere, is also retreating, Hubbard said. He said he was not a climate scientist, but said the pattern of ice melting in the area was "a definite consequence of climate change and global warming."

Writing in the Annals of Glaciology journal, published on Aug. 22, the researchers said Greenland's glaciers had collectively lost 592.6 square miles of ice between 2000 and 2010.

The August 2010 "calving" event saw the creation of an ice island of 112 square miles, causing the Petermann Glacier to retreat by about 8 miles.

The island contained enough water to keep the Delaware or Hudson rivers flowing for two years or to provide the entire U.S. with tap water for 120 days, Andreas Muenchow, professor of ocean science and engineering at the University of Delaware, said at the time.

The Byrd center statement, which summarized the journal report, said while this loss of ice was "extreme compared with others ... it is part of a larger pattern of ice area loss concentrated in north Greenland."

Twice as many glaciers are retreating as the number that are advancing, and the area of ice lost was nine times the amount gained, the researchers found.

'Harbinger of many changes'

At the Congressional hearing in August 2010, the then chairman of the Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming, Rep. Edward Markey, said the melting of the Greenland ice sheet was "but one harbinger of the many changes to come."

"Scientists, skeptical by both nature and training, always urge a dose of caution when looking at any one event as evidence of climate change," he said in his opening statement. "This level of professional skepticism is what makes the overwhelming scientific consensus that climate change is real and caused by man all the more powerful."

Markey listed extreme weather events, such as a record-breaking heatwave and drought in Russia, extreme floods in Asia, record-breaking temperatures on the Eastern Seaboard of the United States and "mega storms and floods" in many parts of the country.

"Take a step back from these individual pieces and we see a mosaic that could not be clearer. Our world is becoming less hospitable with every passing year," he added.

Ian Johnston
msnbc.com
 

September 1, 2011

American pikas, the chirpy, potato-sized denizens of rocky debris in mountain ranges and high plateaus in western North America, are holding their own in the Southern Rocky Mountains, says a new University of Colorado Boulder study.

Led by CU-Boulder doctoral student Liesl Erb, the study team assessed 69 historical sites known to host pikas in a swath of the Southern Rockies ranging from southern Wyoming through Colorado and into northern New Mexico. The results showed that 65 of the 69 historical sites that had hosted pikas -- some dating back more than a century -- were still occupied by the round-eared, hamster-like mammals, Erb said.

The new study stands in contrast to a 2011 study in Nevada's Great Basin that showed local extinction rates of pika populations there have increased nearly five-fold in the past decade. That study, by a separate research group, also showed that local Great Basin pika populations had moved up in elevation nearly 500 feet in the past 10 years, a migration believed to be triggered by warming temperatures.

Despite the low number of extirpations, or local population extinctions, in the Southern Rockies, the CU-Boulder team found that the pattern of pika disappearance at particular sites was not random, said Erb of the ecology and evolutionary biology department and lead study author. "The sites that had been abandoned by pikas in our study area all were drier on average than the occupied sites," she said.

A paper on the new CU-Boulder study by Erb is being published in the September issue of the journal Ecology. Co-authors include CU-Boulder Research Associate Chris Ray and Associate Professor Robert Guralnick, both affiliated with the ecology and evolutionary biology department.

The study was funded primarily by the National Geographic Society.

One likely reason for the relative success of pikas in the Southern Rocky Mountains study is that available habitats are higher in elevation and are more contiguous than habitats in Nevada's Great Basin, said Erb. But some climate models are predicting drier conditions in parts of the Southern Rockies in the coming decades as the climate warms, she said.

Alpine species are among the plants and animals most threatened by climatic shifts because of their physiological and geographic constraints, said Erb. In 2010, the U.S. government denied endangered species listing for the American pika in part because there was insufficient data on its distribution and abundance across western North America. The American pika lives in mountainous regions including British Columbia, Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, Utah, Wyoming, Colorado, Nevada, California and New Mexico.

Surprisingly, most of the pikas that have disappeared from Great Basin sites under study in recent years were from sites that experienced extremely cold temperatures and may be related to a lack of winter snowpack insulation, said Ray, who has participated in several Great Basin pika studies including the 2011 study. Ray suspects pikas may reduce summer foraging activities to avoid heat stress caused by rising temperatures, leading to smaller winter food caches that can't sustain them during extreme cold snaps.

Guralnick, also curator of invertebrate zoology for the University of Colorado Museum of Natural History, said pikas are becoming a "bellwether" species for mountain ecosystems, primarily due to their recent Great Basin declines. Prior to the new CU survey, population trends of pikas in the Rockies were relatively unknown, he said.

"Many have assumed that warming temperatures would be the primary signal affecting North American pikas," said Guralnick. "This study shows it is more complicated than that, and that drier conditions could affect the persistence of pikas across the West."

The CU-Boulder study team initially looked at about 800 historical records of pika sightings in Colorado, New Mexico and Wyoming, but most locations were not specific enough for scientific use. The team eventually narrowed down the historical sites of pikas to 69 specific places known to have been occupied at some point before 1980, using tools like GPS to help pinpoint the geographical accuracy of each individual site.

Members of the rabbit family, the conspicuous pikas can be seen scurrying about rocky debris known as talus in alpine and subalpine regions of the Rockies, emitting their signature, high-pitched squeaks. Instead of hibernating, pikas cache huge amounts of plants and flowers known as hay piles under large rocks that sustain them through the long winters.

The CU team used data from Oregon State University's PRISM Climate Group to compile local climate information from 1908 to 2007 for the 69 historical pika sites in the Southern Rockies. The information produced estimates of monthly precipitation and minimum and maximum temperatures. The team confirmed the presence of pikas at each site either visually, by their distinctive squeaks, or by evidence of fresh pika hay piles cached under rocks in the study areas.

Sites visited early in the 2008 field season that lacked fresh pika signs were revisited in late October and early November for re-evaluation, Erb said. In places where pikas were still absent, researchers searched rock slopes up to two miles in all directions in an attempt to locate pika populations.

Volunteers have helped gather similar data on pikas through the PikaNET program, the Front Range Pika Project and the New Mexico Pika Monitoring Project. Such volunteer projects are organized through collaborations between CU-Boulder, the Colorado Division of Wildlife, the Denver Zoo, Rocky Mountain Wild, Colorado State University, the Mountain Studies Institute in Silverton, Colo., the San Juan Public Lands Center headquartered in Durango, Colo., and the Seventh Generation Institute in Santa Fe, N.M.

"It is good news that pikas are doing better in the Southern Rocky Mountains than some other places," said Erb. "It is likely that the geographic traits of the Rockies are a big reason why we are not seeing significant declines, at least not yet."

Contact

Liesl Erb, 303-859-7803

Liesl.Erb@colorado.edu

On Sept. 6, 2010 the Fourmile Canyon Fire marked history as Colorado’s most destructive fire.  One year later, the University of Colorado Museum of Natural History commemorates the fire with an exhibit focusing on fire science in Colorado’s Front Range.  Learn about the important ecological role of fire and what happened during the Fourmile Canyon Fire.  Discover the role that climate, landscape, and human factors play in affecting fire activity.  See for yourself how scientists reconstruct the region’s fire history with trees scarred from past burns and repeat photography from the 1900s and present.  Explore how the landscape changes following fire, and watch video interviews of firefighters, scientists, and local homeowners.

The exhibit will open Sept. 6, and it is free and open to the public. Visit University of Colorado Museum of Natural History website for museum hours and location information.

Meet the Scientist: Tom Veblen, PhD, professor of geography, will host a formal opening on Thursday, Sept.15 at 7 p.m. in the Paleontology Hall of the University of Colorado Museum of Natural History. A reception prior to the talk will begin at 6 p.m. The event is free and open to the public. Veblen and his students have been studying the data and research findings on long-term fire history in the region to create this public education program.

The Colorado Global Climate Conference is an exciting, hands-on conference to engage high school students in exploring climate science, regional and global effects of changing climate, and sustainable technologies and lifestyles.

When:      Monday, October 17, 2011
Who:        Students in grades 9-12 and their teachers and chaperones
Where:     Lory Student Center at Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO

Participation is free!  Lunch is provided.  This year, the Colorado Global Climate Conference is offering full substitute teacher reimbursement for all teachers bringing students to the conference.

Online registration will be available closer to the conference date.  For more information, please visit:    http://www.cmmap.org/scienceEd/cgcc11/


Supported by CMMAP - The Center for Multiscale Modeling of Atmospheric Processes - A National Science Foundation Science and Technology Center.
 

UCAR/NCAR and UNC Greeley are entering the 2nd year of a NASA funded program called Research Experience for Teachers Institute.  In the first year, twelve Colorado teachers took a series of three online courses on climate science and came to NCAR for 4 weeks to learn from climate scientists and develop classroom modules.  Teachers are able to be paid for their time.  They are currently recruiting the year 2 cohort of teachers and are looking for qualified middle and high school teachers.  If you know any teachers who could benefit from this experience, they may contact Becca Hatheway at hatheway@ucar.edu or 303-497-2597 for more information.
 

July 25, 2011

CU-Boulder National Snow and Ice Data Center news release

An international team of researchers has combined data from multiple sources to provide the clearest account yet of how much glacial ice surges into the sea following the collapse of Antarctic ice shelves.

The work by researchers at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC), the Laboratoire d'Etudes en Géophysique et Océanographie Spatiales, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique at the University of Toulouse, France, and the University of Colorado's National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) details recent ice losses while promising to sharpen future predictions of further ice loss and sea level rise likely to result from ongoing changes along the Antarctic Peninsula.

"Not only do you get an initial loss of glacial ice when adjacent ice shelves collapse, but you get continued ice losses for many years—even decades—to come," says Christopher Shuman, a researcher at UMBC's Joint Center for Earth Systems Technology (JCET) at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. "This further demonstrates how important ice shelves are to Antarctic glaciers."

Shuman is lead author of the study "2001-2009 elevation and mass losses in the Larsen A and B embayments, Antarctic Peninsula" published online today in the Journal of Glaciology.

An ice shelf is a thick floating tongue of ice, fed by a tributary glacier, extending into the sea off a land mass. Previous research showed that the recent collapse of several ice shelves in Antarctica led to acceleration of the glaciers that feed into them. Combining satellite data from NASA and the French space agency CNES, along with measurements collected during aircraft missions similar to ongoing NASA IceBridge flights, Shuman, Etienne Berthier of the University of Toulouse and Ted Scambos of the NSIDC produced detailed ice loss maps from 2001 to 2009 for the main tributary glaciers of the Larsen A and B ice shelves, which collapsed in 1995 and 2002, respectively.

"The approach we took drew on the strengths of each data source to produce the most complete picture yet of how these glaciers are changing," Berthier said, noting that the study relied on easy access to remote sensing information provided by NASA and CNES. The team used data from NASA sources including the Moderate Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instruments and the Ice, Cloud, and land Elevation Satellite (ICESat).

The analysis reveals rapid elevation decreases of more than 500 feet for some glaciers, and it puts the total ice loss from 2001 to 2006 squarely between the widely varying and less certain estimates produced using an approach that relies on assumptions about a glacier's mass budget.

The authors' analysis shows ice loss in the study area of at least 11.2 gigatons per year from 2001 to 2006. Their ongoing work shows ice loss from 2006 to 2010 was almost as large, averaging 10.2 gigatons per year.

"This study shows where the tracking of sea level rise is heading in terms of the level of detail possible and the instrumentation that can be brought to bear," Scambos said. "We're showing that glacier changes can start fast, with a single climate or ocean ‘bang', but they have a long persistence."

The article is available at www.igsoc.org/. An animation showing ice edge changes for the Larsen B ice shelf and its adjacent tributary glaciers is available at svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/goto?3803. A map showing elevation changes of tributary glaciers is available at http://etienne.berthier.free.fr/images/ElevationChange_2001to2006_LarsenB.jpg.
 

A companion paper, "The triggering of sub glacial lake drainage during rapid glacier drawdown: Crane Glacier, Antarctic Peninsula," by the same three authors, led by Scambos, also is available online at www.igsoc.org/annals/ in the issue "Earth's Disappearing Ice: Drivers, Responses and Impacts."
 

For a NSIDC fact sheet visit nsidc.org/quickfacts/iceshelves.html

Contact
Anthony Lane, 410-455-5793
alane@umbc.edu
Katherine Leitzell, 303-492-1497
leitzell@nsidc.org
 

Snowpack in the northern Rocky Mountains has shrunk at an unusually rapid pace during the past 30 years, according to a new study.

The decline is "almost unprecedented" over the past 800 years, say researchers who used tree rings to reconstruct a centuries-long record of snowpack throughout the entire Rocky Mountain range.

Their work, published yesterday in the journal Science, suggests that the plummeting snowpack could have serious consequences for more than 70 million people who depend on water from the runoff-fed Columbia, Colorado and Missouri rivers.

"The Northern Rockies have shown the greatest response to warming in terms of snowpack decline," said lead author Greg Pederson, a research scientist at the U.S. Geological Survey's Northern Rocky Mountain Research Center. "Temperature, especially now, seems to be undercutting snowpack."

That's a marked shift from the pattern that predominated from A.D. 1200 to the 1980s: When snowpack was low in the Northern Rockies, it was high in the Southern Rockies -- and vice versa.

But for the past 30 years or so, snowpack in both regions has shrunk. Pederson and his colleagues pin the blame on warmer springs driven by a combination of rising greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere and natural climate variation.

"In the last 30 years, there's been this growing synchrony where the whole West is getting warmer," said Philip Mote, director of the Oregon Climate Change Research Institute at Oregon State University. "That part is not new, but they point out a few other occasions in the last millennium where there has been low snowpack in the West were also periods that were unusually warm. That's a pretty strong message: that historically, low snowpack and warm spring go hand in hand."

This time, no return to cooler period

Tim Barnett, a climatologist at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, said the new results appear to agree with his earlier work that used climate models to show humans' greenhouse gas emissions have contributed to declining snowpack in the western United States.

"I think we get some idea of what natural variability is in the snowpack," said Barnett, though he noted his expertise lies in climate models, not tree-ring studies. "The fact that things have sort of gone south here in the last 30 to 40 years [in the new study] pretty much jibes with what we've done."

Meanwhile, Pederson said he sees an important difference between modern conditions and the brief 14th- and 15th-century periods of warm temperatures and low snowpack along the Columbia and Missouri river headwaters.

"They were eventually followed by cooling," he said. "Now, alas, we don't expect to return to a cooler period."

That glimpse into the past was provided by 66 tree-ring data sets scientists used to stitch together an annual record of snowpack far older than modern observations, which began in the early 20th century.

They used some records from ponderosa pine and Douglas fir trees, which thrive at lower elevations and in years with heavy snowfall. But to track snowfall in higher elevations, the scientists examined rings from subalpine larch, mountain hemlock and subalpine fir trees -- species whose growth is retarded by snowfall.

Peering into the past

In those cases, "you're often looking at a tree you could easily put your arms around -- and it could be 500 to 800 years old," Pederson said.

The combined tree-ring record is valuable because it overcomes a vexing problem with many modern climate observations: They don't go far enough into the past to show scientists what conditions were like before human activities began transforming the environment.

"We built a system to observe our changing environment during the period it's been changing rapidly," said Mote.

Pederson says he's confident his tree-ring results are accurate in part because during a brief period of overlap during the 20th century, the snowpack depth derived from the tree rings and modern observations look like "photocopies" of one another.

Although the new study describes ongoing decline in snowpack throughout the Rockies, this year has bucked that long-term trend. Record snowpacks have been recorded in the northern West, according to the Agriculture Department's Natural Resources Conservation Service, which monitors snowpack.

Experts characterized it as a brief blip in a longer-term trend of decline. They attributed last year's unusually wet winter to the La Niña weather pattern that was in place from August to May.

"We're seeing 200 to 400 percent of normal for this time of year," said Michael Strobel, director of the service's National Water and Climate Center.

Source: New York Times

http://www.nytimes.com/cwire/2011/06/10/10climatewire-researchers-see-unusually-rapid-decline-in-w-89625.html?smid=tw-nytenvironment&seid=auto

Making the Global Local is an innovative teacher workshop in which CU scientists, teacher educators and science teachers will share their expertise and collaborate in the development and piloting of reform-oriented lessons that frame issues of climate in Colorado. As a participant in this course, you are partnering with the School of Education and the Office for University Outreach at CU-Boulder to form the Making the Global Local (MGL) community. The goal of the course is not only to support teachers in deepening their own climate literacy, but also to develop and pilot new climate change lessons for their classrooms that can be shared with other teachers through the CU’s LearnMoreAboutClimate web site.

This year the course will be held from Aug. 8-12 at UCAR (University Corporation for Atmospheric Research) in Boulder. There will be two field experiences as part of the course as well as opportunities to learn from and talk to well known climate scientists and climate educators. A small amount of advance preparation will be needed to familiarize yourself with the wiki technology used during the course and explore some background information. The course consists of the five-day summer classes, a fall enactment of the lesson you co-construct during the summer classes, and a final follow-up evening meeting to submit completed lessons. There is no fee for this course due to support from CU Outreach and UCAR. You will earn recertification credit through your participation in this course.

If you are interested in participating in this course please email Deborah.morrison@colorado.edu to be placed on the course list. The course will be capped at 20 participants. 

June 8, 2011

A new University of Colorado Boulder study indicates the infestation of trees by mountain pine beetles in the high country across the West could potentially trigger earlier snowmelt and increase water yields from snowpack that accumulates beneath affected trees.

Led by CU-Boulder geological sciences department doctoral student Evan Pugh, the study was undertaken near Grand Lake, Colo., adjacent to Rocky Mountain National Park, an area that has been devastated by mountain pine beetle attacks in recent years. Mountain pine beetles have killed more than 4 million acres of lodgepole pine trees in Colorado and southern Wyoming since 1996, the most severe outbreak on record.

Pugh and his team monitored eight pairs of tree stands, each pair consisting of one live stand and one dead stand roughly an acre each in size and located adjacent to each other, sharing the same topography, elevation and slope. The team monitored the two distinct phases of pine beetle tree death during the three-year study -- the "red phase" in which dead trees still retained red needles, and the "gray phase" in which all of the tree needles and some small branches had been shed, said Pugh.

The study showed that there was roughly 15 percent more snow accumulation under the gray phase stands than under living stands or red phase stands, likely due in large part to a lack of "snow interception" by needled tree branches that can cause snowflakes to "sublimate" into gas and return to the atmosphere, he said. Gray phase trees also allow more solar radiation through their canopies than live trees and red phase trees, increasing the potential for earlier melt, said Pugh, lead study author.

Snowmelt rates were highest under red phase trees, with snow disappearing up to a week earlier than snow in adjacent, healthy stands even though both received the same amount of snowfall at their bases. Pugh showed the earlier snowmelt in red phase tree stands is due in large part to the amount of litter -- needles and branches -- that drops or is blown from the trees onto on the snow surface, decreasing its solar reflecting power, or albedo, and causing it to absorb more of the sun's radiation and heat up slightly.

"This is the first study to look at the potential effects that different stages of mountain pine beetle tree death may have on snowmelt," Pugh said. "What we are seeing is earlier snowmelt and more snow accumulation in dead forests."

A paper on the subject was published online today in the peer-reviewed journal, Ecohydrology. The paper was co-authored by CU-Boulder geological sciences Professor Eric Small and funded in part by a CU-Boulder Innovative Seed Grant. Four undergraduates -- Leslie Baehr, Tevis Blom, Bryant Kealey and Jon Hammond -- received internship credit for helping to conduct the research.

The study took place at the headwaters of the Colorado River in north-central Colorado. Six of the eight healthy tree stands in the study were made up primarily of lodgepole pines, while two were made up of mixed conifer trees. "One of the hardest parts of this study was to find stands of healthy trees in this area," said Pugh.

The red phase that occurs following tree death usually lasts about 18 months, and the onset of the gray phase occurs about three or four years after tree death, said Pugh.

"One of the big surprises to me was that changes in snowpack depth and snowmelt timing as a result of the pine beetle outbreak were not larger," said Small. But the continuing effects could become more significant in the coming decades, he said.

The CU-Boulder team used a wide variety of instruments during the study. In addition to avalanche poles used to periodically measure the snow depth at the 16 study stands, the team also inserted tiny thermometers at various snow depths to help them predict when the snow would likely melt. They also dug snow pits in each of the tree stands and weighed known volumes of snow to calculate density and water content.

Pugh's team also used devices known as pyranometers to measure the snow surface albedo and the transmission of sunlight through forest canopies. Fisheye camera images taken from the snow surface helped the researchers to calculate the size and structure of the various tree stand canopies, he said.

"The students really got something out of working on this project," said Small. "Not only did they get internship credit, they had a chance to conduct meaningful research."

A massive fire in the study area in the late 1800s resulted in most of the succeeding lodgepole pines to be about the same size and age, making them easier targets for pine beetles. While mountain pine beetle infestations are natural events, climate change probably has played a role in the most recent outbreak. Drought conditions in the West in recent years have caused living pines to absorb less water, decreasing their ability to produce enough sap to "pitch out" beetles that are attacking them, Pugh said.

Water managers in Salt Lake City have reported extra water in river basins that hydrologic models had not predicted, Pugh said, an indication beetle-killed trees are having an impact on meltwater.

With the exception of two studies in British Columbia looking at the effects of beetle- killed lodgepole pine trees on snow accumulation and melt on flat terrain at a single site, research regarding the hydrologic impacts of mountain pine beetles has largely been speculative, said Pugh.

"Our study is the first to analyze the multiple stages of tree death from mountain pine beetles and their different impacts on snow accumulation and snowmelt," said Pugh. "There is no on/off switch here -- only gradual changes.

"The effects of the beetle-killed tree stands in terms of snow accumulation are not going to affect ski resort seasons by any means," he said. "What we can say is there likely will be additional water resources for water managers. Additional snowpack coupled with dead trees that are no longer sucking up water will likely lead to more runoff."

For more information visit geode.colorado.edu/~small/foresthydro.html

Contact

Evan Pugh, 303-900-2018
Evan.Pugh@colorado.edu
Eric Small, 303-818-0243
Eric.Small@colorado.edu

Forests to Faucets
A Project Learning Tree & Project WET Workshop for Educators

In this interactive workshop you will explore the relationship between the health of our mountain forests and the quantity and quality of our drinking water. Do you know your connection to the Gulf of Mexico? To the western slope of Colorado? To your own watershed?

Learn how to use interdisciplinary, inquiry and content-rich activities to teach “how to think, not what to think” about complex environmental issues that incorporate technology and literacy as well as how to present material to a culturally diverse audience and include multicultural perspectives. Get wet in the Plum Creek watershed, and help with a forest restoration project.

Dress for the out-of-doors, be prepared for hiking, and splashing!

Date: Sat, 07/16/2011 - 9:00am - Sun, 07/17/2011 - 5:00pm
Who: 4th—12th grade formal and non-formal educators
Materials: Take home both PLT and Project WET activity guides, plus other materials and resources.
Cost: $75.00  For registration information click here or call 303-380-7984. Optional 1 semester credit is an additional $50.00.
Meals: Lunch Saturday through lunch Sunday.
Lodging: Optional camping Saturday night. Bring your own camping equipment. Limited space is available in our dormitory style cabins (you will need to bring your own sheets or sleeping bag, blanket, pillow, and towel).
Instructors: Shawna Crocker, Pavlos Stavropoulos, and guests.

Learn more about Project Learning Tree at www.plt.org and Project WET at www.projectwet.org

Sponsored by the Colorado State Forest Service, Mile High Million (GreenPrint Denver), and Woodbine Ecology Center.