| Have you ever been swimming at the beach and gotten some water in your mouth by mistake? Then you know that the ocean is very salty. But what about other bodies of water? How much salt do they have compared to the ocean?
|  |
Have you seen plankton? I am not talking about the evil villain trying to steal the Crabby Patty recipe from Mr. Crab. I am talking about plankton that live in the ocean. In this experiment you can learn how to collect your own plankton samples and see the wonderful diversity in shape and form of planktonic organisms.
| Have you ever been to a tide pool during low tide? Some intertidal animals in the low tide zone are left in a tiny pool of water when the tides go out. Other intertidal animals that live in high tide zones may be left to dry out during low tide. How much time does each zone spend out of water during a tidal cycle?
|  |
Of course it can, you say: ice is water and ice floats! And you're right. But we're talking about water in the liquid phase (the title reads better without getting overly specific). So how about it? Can liquid water float on water? Check out this project to find out.
If you add salt to water, do you think the density of the water would increase, decrease, or stay the same? Here's a simple experiment that you can do to investigate the density of salt water using cups of water, table salt, and an egg.
We've all heard that hurricanes draw their immense power from warm ocean waters. Of course, many factors contribute to the formation and growth of a hurricane, but can we expect to find that the warmer the water, the stronger the hurricane will be? This project shows you how to use online data archives to investigate this question.
If you've ever so much as watched a news clip about a hurricane, you probably know that hurricanes draw their power from warm ocean waters. If that is true, does it mean that hurricanes actually cool the ocean down when they pass through? Can the amount of cooling be measured? Is it proportional to the strength of the hurricane? Find out using data that you can collect yourself using online archives. This project shows you how.
In this project you can use archived satellite tracking data to learn about activity patterns of harbor porpoises. How far do they travel? Can you find patterns in the routes individual animals take? Can you correlate their route with environmental factors such as currents or ocean temperatures? If you're interested in marine mammals, this might be a good project for you.
Harmful algal blooms occur when algae, which form the base of the ocean food web, grow in massive numbers and produce toxic or harmful effects on people, fish, shellfish, marine mammals, and birds. In this project you will learn how to use archived data from continuous monitoring stations on the Chesapeake Bay to study how water quality measurements (dissolved oxygen (DO), salinity, temperature, pH, turbidity, and total chlorophyll) change before, during, and after harmful algal blooms.
The past few years have histories of extremely powerful and dangerous storms. Storms have also become more numerous over the last few years. To investigate potential effects of climate on hurricane number and strength, in this project you will study the effects of El Niño on hurricanes.
