earth science glaciers worksheets

The study is the first of its kind to use satellite-derived mass change data describing all the world's 215,000 glaciers. The model accounted for glacial debris cover, which can influence glacial melting. A thin layer of debris can enhance melting, while a thick layer can insulate and reduce it.

Glaciers in remote regions, far from human activities, are particularly potent indicators of climate change. Their rapid melting impacts freshwater availability, landscapes, tourism, ecosystems, the frequency and severity of hazards, and sea level rise.

"Sea level rise is not just a problem for a few specific locations," said Ben Hamlington, leader of NASA's Sea Level Change Team. "It’s increasing almost everywhere on Earth."

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September 6, 2023 dialog

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Unraveling a paradox of Himalayan glacier melt

by Ryan M. Strickland

The enigma of hummocky topography

Positive feedback depression growth

Depressions grow like sinkholes

Englacial insights

Journal information: Geophysical Research Letters

Ryan Strickland is a PhD student at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. His current research combines numerical modeling with expedition field work in the Himalaya and Alaska to better understand the evolution of debris-covered glaciers.

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Glaciers Worksheet – Free Science Kids Hidden Words Game Printable

The Glaciers Worksheet – Download our fun FREE science kids hidden words game printable worksheet. This free printable worksheet all about Glaciers for kids has a fun word seek game along with a find-the-hidden-and-missing words puzzle.

This science kids words game is free to download and print at no cost. Our fun facts on Glaciers worksheet is enjoyable for kids in Grammar school in 1st Grade to 5th Grade as well as for younger kids in Kindergarten and Pre-K kids.

This science kids hidden words game about Glaciers is a fun way to interest your child in science and gain your child’s interest during after school science classes or homeschooling science lessons. Children interested in learning about the world will have fun playing the word puzzle game while learning fun facts all about Glaciers.

Grade school kids from First Grade to Fifth Grade can use this free printable Glaciers worksheet as a reading comprehension worksheet. Children shall learn well about Glaciers, as they will most likely need to read a few times the fun facts about Glaciers to find all the missing words.  This exercise will not only improve children’s skills to remember what they read but also enhance their reading skills.

Kindergarten and Preschool kids who don’t yet know how to read can use this free Glaciers fun facts worksheet as an interesting listening comprehension game.

Teachers or Educators can read the all about Glaciers fun facts and then ask the children to recall what the missing words were.  Kindergarten & Pre-K kids can also enjoy playing the hidden words puzzle while learning to find and recognize letters and words.

Parents can use our fun facts about Glaciers for kids worksheet to do fun homeschooling or early learning science activities with their kids and spend quality time educating their kids about Glaciers. If your kid is enjoying home-schooling, or is enrolled in some extra-curricular program, then this is a fun science activity, with reading comprehension benefits for kids in grades one to five.

Teachers can use this free kids hidden words game to engage kids interest during science classes and to make learning facts about Glaciers interesting for kids.

Tutors can use our Glaciers free science hidden words game for extra-curricular science lessons or child enrichment programs.

Our fun facts on science for kids website offers many free science kids hidden words games and free science printable worksheets for kids. Download and use our fun science word puzzles to make learning science a fun experience for your kids!

What makes a Glacier form? Glaciers occur when the  snow falls faster than it can melt.

Learn more fun facts about Glaciers by downloading this free science kids Glaciers worksheet!

Free Printable Glaciers Worksheet for Kids

[sociallocker] Download our FREE science kids hidden words game about Glaciers .

Did you enjoy the FREE Glaciers Worksheet for Kids ? Read lengthy facts about Glaciers here .

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Hands-on Lessons and Activities about Glaciers

Glaciers can be a difficult subject to teach. Most students haven’t ever seen one. Furthermore, glaciers’ size and relatively slow rate of change make it difficult to understand how they can change the surface of the earth. Images from online galleries and children’s literature can help students begin to visualize these massive bodies of ice. Creating models will help them develop a basic understanding of the scientific principles at work in glacial formation , movement , and erosion . While many of these lessons are written for the upper elementary grades, teachers of primary students may be able to modify them by performing demonstrations rather than investigations.

Many of these lessons and activities lend themselves to making predictions, so we’ve chosen to highlight that strategy as our literacy integration . Students become proficient readers by making predictions and evaluating them based on the text, much in the same way that proficient scientists make predictions and evaluate based on experimental data. You may choose to have students record predictions on a worksheet or in a journal, or record their oral predictions as you discuss the experiment or text.

GLACIAL FORMATION

How Do Snowflakes Become Ice? (Grades K-5) Students model the formation of ice with marshmallows or, if it is available, snow. Lesson extensions suggest using snow cones or shaved ice to model the difference between snow, firn (an intermediate stage between snow and ice), and glacial ice. This lesson meets the National Science Education Standards : Science as Inquiry Content Standard, the Physical Science Content Standard, the Earth and Space Science Content Standard, and the History and Nature of Science Content Standard.

Glacial Pressure (Grades 3-5) In this lesson plan, students model glacial formation through the compression of marshmallows, which represent snow. Students observe the effect of pressure exerted on marshmallows and draw conclusions about pressure exerted on snow.

This lesson meets the National Science Education Standards : Science as Inquiry Content Standard and the Earth and Space Science Content Standard.

GLACIAL MOVEMENT

Blue Ice Cube Melt (Grades K-5) Students experiment with blue-colored ice cubes and learn that ice can melt under pressure. This lesson meets the National Science Education Standards : Science as Inquiry Content Standard, the Physical Science Content Standard, the Earth and Space Science Content Standard, and the History and Nature of Science Content Standard.

Modeling Glacier Dynamics with Flubber (Grades 2-3) Modeling Glacier Dynamics with Flubber (Grades 3-5)

These hands-on activities simulate glacial flow. The students use a glacier-modeling compound made from glue, water, and detergent (“flubber”) to predict and observe glacial flow. The students discuss with the teacher how scientists determine glacial flow with real glaciers. The link opens a zipped file that contains three documents: the teacher’s guide, notes, and a worksheet.

This unit meets the National Science Education Standards : Science as Inquiry Content Standard and the Earth and Space Science Content Standard.

GLACIAL EROSION

Explaining Glaciers, Accurately (Grades 3-5) This article from the National Science Teachers Association journal Science and Children describes two activities that help students develop correct understanding of how glaciers change the earth’s surface by plucking and abrasion. Free for NSTA members and nonmembers.

This lesson meets the National Science Education Standards : Earth and Space Science Content Standard.

INTEGRATING LITERACY

Use the books in this month’s Virtual Bookshelf and our Feature Story to help your students practice making predictions while reading!

It Doesn’t Have to End That Way: Using Prediction Strategies with Literature (Grades K-2) Primary students listen to the beginning of a story, and then use details in the text and prior knowledge to predict the way the story will end.

This lesson meets the following NCTE/IRA standards: 3, 4, 11, 12 .

Using Prediction as a Prereading Strategy (Grades 3-5) This three part lesson includes teacher modeling, guided practice, and independent practice with response journals. The lesson uses fiction trade books, but the approach can be used with any text or content area.

This activity meets the following NCTE/IRA standards: 3, 5 .

This article was written by Jessica Fries-Gaither. For more information, see the Contributors page. Email Kimberly Lightle , Principal Investigator, with any questions about the content of this site.

Copyright August 2009 – The Ohio State University. This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 0733024. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. This work is licensed under an  Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported Creative Commons license .

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Glaciers: Ice That Flows

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What does a melting glacier sound like? 'Gunshots.'

Glaciers are full of billions of loud bubbles—here’s what they tell us about our planet.

Tiny, pressurized air bubbles, trapped in ice, are accelerating the decline of some of the world’s glaciers, scientists have recently discovered.

In tidewater glaciers—large rivers of ice that pour into the sea—the steady melting of ice underwater causes billions of these bubbles to burst into the water “like little tiny gunshots,” says Erin Pettit, a glaciologist at Oregon State University in Corvallis, who is part of the team that made the discovery.

That violent pop of air stirs up the cold layer of water that hugs the surface of the glacial ice—bringing warmer water, several inches away, into contact with it. The bubbles then rise buoyantly through the water—driving turbulent currents that also bring warm water into contact with the ice.

The glaciers of Alaska, where Pettit’s team conducted the study, are currently losing over 70 billion tons of ice per year, a loss that causes seas to rise around the globe.

This new discovery stems from a 15-year effort by Pettit to understand an important but dangerous environment. In addition to improving our understanding of climate change, her efforts could also explain sharp reductions in the abundance of seals in some Alaskan fjords.

Unlocking the anatomy of a melting glacier

Few people realize it, but glaciers are full of tiny air bubbles. They form as snow, accumulating over thousands of years, slowly compresses into ice under its own weight—squishing the air that was trapped between snowflakes into microscopic pores. A cubic foot of glacial ice can hold over five million bubbles. Those bubbles are compressed to as much as 20 times the pressure of the Earth’s atmosphere.

Pettit and her colleagues had suspected for several years that these bubbles might cause the ice in tidewater glaciers to melt more quickly. To test this idea, they undertook a series of laboratory experiments.

They harvested blocks of bubble-rich ice from a tidewater glacier in Alaska called Xeitl Sít’ in Tlingit (also known as LeConte Glacier) and watched as the ice melted in a fish tank filled with sea water. As a comparison, they also melted blocks of bubble-free ice, which they purchased from a local ice sculpting artist.

As the ice melted, the resulting fresh water rose, because it was less dense than the surrounding sea water. This created a rising current along the vertical face of the ice—a microcosm of what occurs at the front of a real tidewater glacier. When the glacial ice melted, the current that it produced was six times faster than what was seen with the bubble-free ice because the rising bubbles pulled the water up more quickly. The glacial ice melted 2.25 times more quickly than the bubble-free ice.

“That’s a very powerful effect,” says Keith Nicholls, a polar oceanographer with the British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge, who was not part of the team. “If that’s the reality in nature, then it’s quite serious.”

The discovery was published today in the journal Nature Geoscience .

Discovering the “snap, crackle, and pop” of glaciers

Pettit’s first inklings that bubbles could be important came from monitoring glacier changes from afar.

Although huge amounts of melting happen at the calving fronts of tidewater glaciers, scientists are reticent to approach them too closely, due to the risks involved. The fronts of these glaciers tower up to 200 feet above the water, forming sheer walls that can send 50-ton ice blocks plunging downward at any moment, triggering waves that can crush or capsize small boats.

In 2009, Pettit tried to monitor the ice front from a safe distance in Icy Bay, Alaska, using hydrophones to record sounds underwater. She expected to hear icebergs calving off the glacier—perhaps even the low, garden-hose gurgle of a subglacial river gushing out from underneath the glacier.

But the main noise captured by these recordings was something more continuous, “like a sizzling pan of cooking food—a bit of snap, crackle, and pop,” says Pettit.

At 120 decibels, “the sounds were off the charts,” she says, louder than a car horn or a kitchen blender. The sounds were so loud that Jeffrey Nystuen, an oceanographer from the University of Washington who loaned her the hydrophones, believed the equipment was malfunctioning.

( Chile's glaciers are dying, and you can actually hear it—read more. )

Only after several more years of capturing recordings in other fjords did Nystuen finally embrace Pettit’s interpretation: that the sounds came from air bubbles popping out of the ice as it melted.

How bubbles expose glaciers to warming oceans

When Pettit published those observations back in 2015, she hoped to use the underwater sounds to monitor the rate of melting, and how it changed over the seasons. The full importance of the bubbles didn’t emerge until 2018, when she happened to discuss them with a newly hired professor at Oregon State.

As Pettit chatted over wine with Meagan Wengrove, an engineer and the study’s lead author, who studies the turbulence of rivers, they realized that those bubbles might actually mix up the thin ‘boundary layer’ of cold water that often insulates glacial ice from warm water. That very afternoon they rushed to out to a pet store and bought an aquarium that they would use in their newly published experiments.

Jonathan Nash, an oceanographer at Oregon State who is part of the team (and also Pettit’s husband), thinks that the bubbles probably exert their strongest melting effects in glaciers that thin substantially as they flow into the ocean, in places like Alaska, Canada, and Greenland—bringing ice that had been deeply buried up close to the surface.

These conditions will bring highly pressurized bubbles into the shallow part of the ocean (say the upper 300 feet) where the pressure inside the bubble is much higher than the surrounding water pressure—allowing the bubble to expand explosively and rise quickly.

Nash doesn’t expect these bubbles to have as much widespread impact in Antarctica, where most of the melting currently happens at far deeper depths, where the water pressure is higher—blunting the bubbles’ explosive effects.

What do bursting bubbles mean for rising seas?

These new results don’t mean that tidewater glaciers will melt and retreat twice as quickly as scientists had expected. But the new findings could help solve a long-standing mystery: in some tidewater glaciers in places like Alaska, Canada, and Greenland, the ice front is melting 10 times more quickly than scientists think it should, based on the water temperature.

The newly discovered bubble effect could explain some of that extra melting, says Mathieu Morlighem, a glaciologist at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. “It’s improving our understanding, but it’s not painting a darker picture of what’s happening today,” he says.

The new discovery will help scientists like Morlighem improve their models to better predict the future shrinkage of glaciers as oceans warm in the coming century. “It’s really, really critical,” he says. “We need a lot more work like this, to better understand the interaction between ocean water and the ice, and what drives that melt rate.”

New theories about bubbles in icy ecosystems

Pettit speculates that these glacial bubbles may have yet other, unseen effects in places like Alaska—perhaps even shaping aquatic ecosystems.

She notes that in Alaska, many fjords with tidewater glaciers have large populations of harbor seals. The animals shelter there while molting and raising pups. But in Glacier Bay, where the tidewater glaciers retreated many miles inland, the seal populations have declined. ­­­­

Pettit now suspects that the roaring patter of exploding bubbles provides a hiding place where seals can avoid detection by hungry orcas, which often find their prey by listening. The bubbles may mask the seals’ sounds—at least until the ice retreats out of earshot.

This may turn out to be yet another way in which these tiny bubbles have surprisingly large-scale effects—the proverbial ‘butterfly effect’—whereby tiny flapping wings spawn storms in distant places.

“Can these sub-millimeter bubbles actually affect the global ocean circulation” and global sea level? asks Nash: “Maybe they can.”

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The 50th Anniversary of the EROS Center: Honoring Five Decades of Innovation Through STEM Outreach Activities

• September 7, 2023

By Ellie Leydsman McGinty

A Prominent Center for Earth Observation

The Earth Resources Observation and Science (EROS) Center recently celebrated its 50th anniversary from August 17-19, 2023. The EROS Center, located northeast of Sioux Falls, South Dakota, is a federal science center operated by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) that was established as a central repository for Landsat (formerly Earth Resources Technology Satellite) imagery, NASA aircraft and spacecraft data, and USGS aerial photography. Throughout its five decades of service, the EROS Center has become the primary steward of remotely sensed land images of the Earth, a pivotal leader in studying the Earth’s land areas and natural resources, and an authoritative provider of land change science data and information.  The inception of the EROS Center can be traced back to September 21, 1966, when Stewart Udall, then-Secretary of the Interior, issued a press release announcing Project EROS: An Earth Resources Observation Satellite Program. Project EROS was visualized as a collaborative USGS-NASA interagency Earth-observing satellite program that would acquire space-based data for natural and human resource management. After NASA signed the project approval document for the first Earth Resources Technology Satellite (ERTS-1) in January 1969, the USGS recognized the need for a facility that would process, distribute, and archive the data from the mission. Funds were accordingly appropriated in 1970 to build a data center. On March 31, 1970, a site near Sioux Falls, South Dakota, was strategically chosen based on data transmission investigations, socioeconomic needs, and political support. South Dakota Senator Karl E. Mundt was a key factor in generating the financial resources to make the data center possible. On August 7, 1973, the Karl E. Mundt Federal Building at the EROS Center was dedicated, and on January 1, 1974, the facility became fully operational. By the time the building was dedicated, ERTS-1 (later renamed Landsat 1) had been generating images for over one year. Employees of the EROS Center, who had been working in interim facilities in Sioux Falls, had already processed and produced an average of 25,000 images and photographs per month in response to requests from users all over the world. Within a year of the EROS Center becoming fully operational, imagery, photography, and electronic data from 16 different organizations were being distributed and archived.

A Landmark Celebration

To commemorate the milestone anniversary of the EROS Center, a three-day celebration was held to honor 50 years of excellence and service to the local community, the nation, and the world. The celebration featured an evening community reception, a ribbon-cutting ceremony, a rededication event, and a “Friends and Family” open house. The open house consisted of special tours, science talks, alumni presentations, and STEM activities. AmericaView , a nationwide network of educators, took the lead in organizing and hosting a STEM event designed to engage learners across all age groups.  In collaboration with key partners, such as the NASA Landsat Communications and Public Engagement (CPE) Team, the NASA AREN AEROKATS Team, South Dakota State University, and South DakotaView , AmericaView curated several interactive stations for attendees in the USGS EROS Library that provided an overview of remote sensing and underscored the significance of Earth observation. The stations included the following offerings: a table with Landsat outreach materials; a Landsat collage activity; a Frustrationless Flyer kite -building and coloring activity; thermal (FLIR) camera and drone displays; and a demonstration of the STELLA handheld spectrometer . The STEM event had high levels of attendance and engagement, with visitors enjoying hands-on activities and eager to learn more about the Landsat Program and Earth observation.

A Spotlight on STELLA

During the event, the STELLA handheld spectrometer became a focal point of interest. STELLA (Science and Technology Education for Land/Life Assessment), a portable do-it-yourself (DIY) scientific instrument developed by the Landsat CPE Team, supports remote sensing education and outreach through scientific inquiry and discovery. As a DIY build, students, teachers, and young scientists can gain hands-on experience in science, technology, and engineering as they follow freely available online plans, instructions, and activities. With state-of-the-art sensors, STELLA measures the intensity of light reflected from surfaces across 12 different wavelength ranges in the visible and near-infrared regions of the electromagnetic spectrum. The instrument also encompasses sensors that measure surface temperature (emitted far infrared light). The spectral measurements acquired by STELLA correspond to those collected by sensors on Landsat satellites.  Attendees of the EROS 50th anniversary STEM event were drawn to the educational value and versatility of STELLA. The device offers a wide range of STEM-based learning activities, from building and programming an instrument to collecting, visualizing, and interpreting real-world scientific data. Guests were inspired by the capabilities and potential applications of the device, as the demonstration provided a foundational understanding of how the sensors on Landsat satellites collect data and how the data can be used to assess vegetation health. The online STELLA Dataviewer provided a platform for displaying, understanding, and exploring the spectral responses from different surfaces and materials. The STELLA augmented reality (AR) promotional card, which allows viewing of a 3D STELLA model on Instagram, served as a fascinating conversation piece and interactive experience.

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+ USGS EROS Celebrates 50 Years of a Mission that Matters

+ Celebrating a Half-Century at EROS: Serving the Nation and the World Since 1973

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+ AmericaView Supports USGS EROS in Celebrating 50 Years of Science and Discovery

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