Joint
Science Education Program brings high-school students to Arctic research sites
While most of the U.S. was battling
record July heat, some U.S. students were seeing world-class research up-close
in one of the world's coldest and most scientifically significant places: the
tundra and ice sheet in Greenland.
The students--from the states of Alaska,
Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, New York and Washington--were in Greenland as part of
the Joint Science Education Program (JSEP), a cultural and scientific exchange
between Denmark, Greenland and the United States, under the guidance of
teachers from all three nations.
The three-week JSEP experience was
divided into two parts: the Greenlandic-led Field School--which took place in
and around Kangerlussuaq, Greenland--and Science Education Week, in which
students visited Danish and U.S. research stations on the Greenland Ice Sheet.
The National Science Foundation coordinates the Science Education Week
experience.
In addition to being on the ground
during a rare widespread melt of the ice sheet's surface, the students descended
into a pit at NSF's Summit Camp to see how annual snows turn into layers of
ice; used off-the-shelf scientific tools as part of an NSF-funded
distance-learning pilot project with students in Idaho; worked with researchers
measuring Arctic methane releases as groundwork for building a sensor for a
possible future Mars probe; and visited the multi-year, Danish-led North
Greenland Eemian (NEEM) Ice Drilling project, a paleoclimate research program,
just as drilling came to an end.
-NSF-
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