With populations and sea levels rising, this video presents seasteading, or floating communities, as a solution to finding more space to live.
Students will learn about plans for building Oceanix City, a floating city designed to withstand category 5 hurricanes.
Teaching Tips
Positives
This video explains how floating cities will grow food, produce clean energy, and desalinate and recycle water.
The video exposes students to multiple scientific technologies.
The video description contains a link to the video's script and citations.
Additional Prerequisites
There are ads before and during the video.
Students should be familiar with the threat of sea level rise.
Differentiation
Design or engineering classes could discuss the potential benefits and barriers to Oceanix City.
Students could work in small groups to learn more about a segment of the video and present their findings to the class.
Social studies classes could use this video to discuss solutions for climate migrants.
Other resources on this topic include this resource on sinking cities and this article on protecting coastal communities.
Scientist Notes
The resource underscores the concept of seasteading, an innovative approach to reducing population density and pressure on land and to improving the energy sector, food systems, and water quality. From case-study research, this technology is still undergoing testing but the video is insightful and recommended for teaching.
Standards
Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS)
ESS3: Earth and Human Activity
MS-ESS3-2 Analyze and interpret data on natural hazards to forecast future catastrophic events and inform the development of technologies to mitigate their effects.
HS-ESS3-2 Evaluate competing design solutions for developing, managing, and utilizing energy and mineral resources based on cost-benefit ratios.
ETS1: Engineering Design
MS-ETS1-2 Evaluate competing design solutions using a systematic process to determine how well they meet the criteria and constraints of the problem.
HS-ETS1-3 Evaluate a solution to a complex real-world problem based on prioritized criteria and trade-offs that account for a range of constraints, including cost, safety, reliability, and aesthetics, as well as possible social, cultural, and environmental impacts.
College, Career, and Civic Life (C3) Standards
Dimension 2: Geography
D2.Geo.10.6-8 Analyze the ways in which cultural and environmental characteristics vary among various regions of the world.
D2.Geo.10.9-12 Evaluate how changes in the environmental and cultural characteristics of a place or region influence spatial patterns of trade and land use.
D2.Geo.12.9-12 Evaluate the consequences of human-made and natural catastrophes on global trade, politics, and human migration.
D2.Geo.6.9-12 Evaluate the impact of human settlement activities on the environmental and cultural characteristics of specific places and regions.
D2.Geo.9.9-12 Evaluate the influence of long-term climate variability on human migration and settlement patterns, resource use, and land uses at local-to-global scales.
