Cutting Edge > Topics > Climate Change > Ideas for Teaching about Ice Cores > Bipolar Climate Puzzle


Bipolar Climate Puzzler

Contributors: Alan Ashworth, Lisa Doner, Kathy Licht, Warren Tomkiewicz

Topic: Climate oscillations in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres

This activity designed for a capstone activity for an upper-level course.

Description of the activity:

  1. Develop graphs of data from the GISP and Vostok core data
  3. Observation and interpretation of data
  4. Answer the observational questions:
    • What do they notice
    • What does it mean?
    • What is the scale of this behavior? Frequency of change?
    • What could cause this?
  5. Discuss the relationship between data sets
  6. Generate multiple hypotheses for cause of observed relationships

Provide research papers or chapters in a book to access background information: Thermohaline circulation; Milankovic cycles

What are the learning goals or outcomes of the activity?

Student will be able to:

How would you assess whether the goals have been met?

References or other resources that would be useful for this activity:

NOAA Paleoclimatology Databases (more info)
NOAA Paleo-Perspectives on Climate Timeline
Timing of Millennial-Scale Climate Change in Antarctica and Greenland During the Last Glacial Period, by Thomas Blunier and Edward J. Brook, Science, January 5 2001: Vol. 291. no. 5501, pp. 109 - 112. (abstract)

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