Submitted by Anonymous on Mon, 01/07/2008 - 06:24

Good morning Kirk. Barney here again. 

The students haven't arrived yet...still an hour or so to go.  We are having another day of snow flurries turning to rain here in the Pacific Northwest.  That reminds me of the students' question last Friday during a weather discussion:  When Antarctic snow is melted, how much snow has to be melted to get an inch of water?  We have used a snow board here and a straight-sided collection container to melt snow and then compare the amount of water we get from it.  Our snow is almost always very "wet" with high water content.  What can you tell us about your snow in Antarctica?

Have a great day.  The students are really appreciating your responses and I am enjoying the vicarious experience and hoping to get to Antarctica myself one day.

Barney

Kirk Beckendorf

Hi Barney,Sounds like there must be a big storm in the western US. I received an email from a teacher in Arizona and their school is canceled due to a snowstorm.
George said the snow here is very dry but it varies alot. An average number would be 1 inch of water to 12 inches of snow.
I am going to try and get over to the fire station today to talk to the firefighters to get a more thorough answer about fire fighting, but George said that they actually do use water to fight fires. Yesterday there was an evacuation in one of the buildings due to the fire alarms going off. There was not a fire, the last I heard was that no one knew why the alarms went off.
Kirk 

Barney Peterson

Wow!  You really got the students thinking by saying that firefighters do use water.  They have been coming up with all kinds of "Rube Goldberg" devices to provide the water and keep it in liquid state.  Since our current science unit is on properties of matter, the exercise could not be more timely!  Between thinking about changing from solid to liquid and insulating to maintain temperature, we have really set them up for the learning experiences in the unit.  Way to go.  It really reinforces how valuable using on-line experiences can be in creating excitement in learning science.  I can hardly wait to do the ice core simulations and glacier modeling from the Andrill project circle activities.  If you get a chance for some internet browsing, we put the eggs in our salmon tank today and will be figuring out possible hatching date by calculating accumulated thermal units and setting our tank temperature.  That work will be added to the web site tomorrow or Wednesday.  I put the web address down (home page).
Stay warm. Barney