This interactive timelapse displays the effects of rising temperatures in nine locations around the world to illustrate the global challenges of climate change.
Students will view images of melting glaciers and ice sheets, depleting water sources, wildfires, and hurricanes.
For each location, the images are accompanied by a short text description.
Teaching Tips
Positives
The resource includes many impactful visuals.
Students learn about a variety of negative effects of rising global temperatures.
Additional Prerequisites
Students should be familiar with keywords such as glacier, sea level rise, drought, climate change, and global warming.
Students should be comfortable interpreting satellite imagery.
Differentiation
After exploring the resource, students can be challenged to identify another location experiencing the effects of rising global temperatures and present it to the class.
This can be used as a cooperative learning activity where groups research the different topics in the resource (receding glaciers, droughts, wildfires, extreme weather, etc.) and present their findings to the class.
Science classes can use this resource when learning about landforms, regional climates, and climate change.
Geography classes can use this resource to explore the environmental characteristics of various places around the world and how these characteristics are changing over time.
Scientist Notes
Visuals of the Earth's features such as glaciers, ice sheets, oceans, etc. are warming as a result of increasing surface temperatures. Insightful for students to zoom in and gain insights. Recommended for teaching.
Standards
Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS)
ESS3: Earth and Human Activity
MS-ESS3-3 Apply scientific principles to design a method for monitoring and minimizing a human impact on the environment.
MS-ESS3-5 Ask questions to clarify evidence of the factors that have caused the rise in global temperatures over the past century.
HS-ESS3-5 Analyze geoscience data and the results from global climate models to make an evidence-based forecast of the current rate of global or regional climate change and associated future impacts to Earth systems.
College, Career, and Civic Life (C3) Standards
Dimension 2: Geography
D2.Geo.2.6-8 Use maps, satellite images, photographs, and other representations to explain relationships between the locations of places and regions, and changes in their environmental characteristics.
Dimension 4: Taking Informed Action
D4.6.6-8 Draw on multiple disciplinary lenses to analyze how a specific problem can manifest itself at local, regional, and global levels over time, identifying its characteristics and causes, and the challenges and opportunities faced by those trying to address the problem.
D4.6.9-12 Use disciplinary and interdisciplinary lenses to understand the characteristics and causes of local, regional, and global problems; instances of such problems in multiple contexts; and challenges and opportunities faced by those trying to address these problems over time and place.
