Gases from the Past- Frozen Change
Data Story
Heat-trapping gases in our atmosphere act like a blanket that’s getting thicker. Students identify and interpret patterns that might be covered up by manipulated axis scales.
Welcome to this Tuva data story! To look at past climates, scientists can use ice cores. By drilling deep into ice sheets on glaciers and at the poles, they can look back in time thousands and even hundreds of thousands of years. Working in very cold and specialized laboratories, they look at the widths of the different rings as well as any materials that might be trapped within the ice. The ice cores have layers from yearly snowfall. These layers are like a pile of papers on a desk - with the most recent layer on top. In each of the layers, there are deposits from the atmosphere including small bubbles of gas which were trapped when the snow fell, like a snapshot of the atmosphere when the bubble formed. Scientists can extract those bubbles and measure the levels of gases from each layer to reconstruct the history of the atmosphere. In this data story, you will identify and interpret patterns in graphs of carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide from the past 1500 years. Click Next to begin!
Topics and standards: Science, Proportion, Climate Change, Earth Science, Scale, Human Impacts, Global Change, Grades 6-8, Quantity, Identify-Interpret Patterns, Computational Reasoning