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Louise Huffman is the education coordinator for the Andrill Project.  She happened to come to our class.  She showed us many pictures of her trip to Antarctica.  We did an activity with her and she taught us about diatoms.  She also showed us how the Andrill drill works and the people who work there.  She brought back our Pound banner with Antarctica air on it and it was signed by some of the scientists.  It was a great honor to have Louise Huffman, an Antarctica scientist, come to our school.

Krill is the most popular food for sea animals.  Next to phytoplankton and zooplankton, it is the main food in the Antarctic food chain.  Then fin fish, and squid.  We learned that if krill dies out, then many other Antarctic animals will die, too.  Whales, seals, and seabirds are at the top of the food chain, which means they don't get eaten.

We learned about the carrying capacity of the ocean in which the krill live.  We played a game with buttons representing the krill.  We harvested the krill to see if we could keep the carrying capacity of the ocean stable.  We found out krill are disappearing because of overfishing.  Many creatures in the ocean around Antarctica depend on krill to live.  If there is not enough krill, the animals won't survive either.  Phytoplankton, tiny floating plants, that grow in Antarctic's summer season, get eaten by the krill. 

The Inconvenient Truth is a video about global warming by Al Gore.  It focuses on the effects of global warming in our society.  One of the segments showed us how in the Arctic, polar bears are going to be gone because they go out too far in the ocean to find their food.  There is no ice for them and so they don't survive.  The ice is melting due to warmer climates.

Today we learned what happens when ice sheets melt.  When they melt, all the sediments drop to the bottom of the ocean.  So, all the diatoms in the sediment drop, too.  When Andrill scientists drill for core samples, they locate diatoms in the sediment core which tells them a tale about the history of Antarctica.