Yr12 Cold Environments

Whilst I was off, you were researching and putting together a timeline and an annotated map showing the human activity in Antarctica. I now have that work from most of you, but there are still a few who didn't manage to find their way to the Humanities Block before the end of schoool today, and I am not very happy about that.

You also should have spent some time checking that you had thorough notes about each of the glacial landforms we mentioned (U-shaped valleys/glacial troughs, ribbon lakes, corries, aretes, pyramidal peaks, roche moutonnees and drumlins).

Yesterday, we looked at fluvioglaciation - processes and landforms caused by glacial meltwater. The photos we looked at at the start of the lesson were of Skeidarasandur - lots more on Flickr and it is worth a quick search to find out a bit more about the jokulhlaups that we mentioned.

For Tuesday next week (to Mrs Chambers), I asked you to describe and explain the landforms that you would expect to find in a fluvioglacial landscape. (You should be including outwash plains, braided streams, eskers and beaded eskers, kames and kame terraces, kettle holes, diverted drainage and proglacial lakes.)

Dress the Antarctic scientist...

Reminders about last week's lessons will be appearing over the weekend... As Yr13 were so upset that we didn't have time to play "Dress the Antarctic scientist" though, here it is:




Enjoy!!

Tourism in Antarctica

Thanks to Anna who has just sent me this link to a news story about the increase in tourism in Antarctica.

You may well have seen the other day that another tourist cruise ship ran aground just off the Antarctic Peninsula. All the passengers were rescued, and it was thought that the ship was unlikely to sink, but it was leaking fuel... The picture below will take you to the BBC coverage of the story.

Wilderness....

A brief discussion about tourism in Antarctica - the "last great wilderness"... We will look at Antarctica and its legal status, etc. next week.

We then had a look at the US "wilderness areas" and focussed specifically on southern Utah and the impacts of off-roading (with some consideration of mountain biking for Eddie's benefit!).

Some interesting thoughts and ideas about what the value of these wilderness areas is, and whether it matters that they are being destroyed... You need (even if you thought the discussion was "too heated" for you Jak!) to think about these a little bit more and come to some conclusions - particularly considering the idea of sustainability...

The wilderness site I mentioned was www.wilderness.net - spend some time exploring as there is lots and lots of useful stuff on there.