More than 170 eighth-graders from Boulder's Southern Hills Middle School will visit the University of Colorado at Boulder on Tuesday, April 24, for an excursion involving lab tours, talks, science games and a field trip along Boulder Creek.
The students will be hosted by CU-Boulder's Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research and the National Snow and Ice Data Center on the university's East Campus. The students will be at CU-Boulder from about 9 a.m. to noon. The East Campus is located at 30th Street and Marine Street.
The eighth-graders will be sampling the aquatic insect life along Boulder Creek during the visit as part of an ecosystem education project coordinated by INSTAAR. They also will tour INSTAAR's sediment, radiocarbon, stable isotope, dissolved organic matter, pollen, and tree-ring dating labs.
The event also will include talks by INSTAAR faculty on global warming and the Arctic, the archaeology of glaciers, early humans in Europe 40,000 years ago and volcanoes in Antarctica. The talks and other activities will focus on climate change and the International Polar Year, which began in March.
The Southern Hills students also will tour facilities at NSIDC, which conducts research around the world and archives and distributes data on snow, avalanches, glaciers, ice sheets, sea ice and ice cores. For more information contact INSTAAR's William Manley at (303) 735-1300 or Jim Scott at (303) 492-3114.