FAIRBANKS, Alaska — Betsy Wilkening had never seen diamond dust — tiny ice crystals — or frost flowers — frozen brine that collects on sea ice — before an expedition to Barrow last summer.
"I learned that 40-below-zero is the same in Celsius as in Fahrenheit," Wilkening said recently from her classroom in Tucson, Ariz.
The seventh-grade science teacher spent three weeks in Barrow last summer through PolarTrec, a program run by the Fairbanks-based Arctic Research Consortium of the United States.
PolarTrec, funded by the National Science Foundation, has sent about 50 mostly middle and high school teachers from across the United States on research trips in the Arctic and Antarctic in its three- year life.
"The polar regions are one of the regions that are changing the quickest in the world," Wilkening said. "The desert southwest is being affected by climate change too, and people don't really make that connection. I wanted to help my students make that connection."
The program exposes teachers to arctic research to spread knowledge and awareness to students and the broader education community. Program administrators pair science teachers with researchers on projects stretching from archaeology to permafrost monitoring to tundra ecology.
Teachers and researchers apply for the program in the fall, administrators narrow the candidates and then let scientists make the picks before the field season — July through March. Both teachers and researchers describe how valuable — and fun — the field experiences have been and how they've disseminated the knowledge gathered in the Arctic.
Wilkening, who has a background in chemical engineering, was on a project sampling snow for nitrates, soluble chemicals, organics and reflectivity. Other scientists in her group measured organic pollutants, which bioaccumulate in the food chain, in the snow.
"A lot of these pollutants, these chemicals, they travel a long way and so concentrate up in the Arctic," Wilkening said.
She demonstrated that in the classroom this year, with the help of marshmallows.
"Today we learned about bioaccumulation and what that means," she said. "Each marshmallow represents one concentration of a toxin. You start out lower in the food chain, and they have these photoplankton cards, and you put 10 marshmallows on each card."
When fish eat 10 photoplankton, the toxins multiply by a factor of 20.
"By the time they get up to the humans, you're talking about 100,000 marshmallows," she said.
The mission of the program is professional development as well as outreach.
"We tell the teachers, You have to go into this really open-minded and willing to absorb what you can,'" program coordinator Kristin Timm said.
In addition to doing fieldwork and transmitting information to students, teachers also give researchers tips for communicating their research effectively.
"Teachers are outreach specialists," Timm said.
That's why Bill Hedman, an archaeologist for the Bureau of Land Management based in Fairbanks, applied for the program. He has been working on a project near Kivalina for the past four years. In 2009, his team found a fluted spear point along with bones dating back 10,000 years, a combination that could answer important questions about the civilization of the New World.
To share the big news, he applied for PolarTrec and picked Karl Horeis, a teacher from Portland, to help spread the word locally and remotely. He took two high school students from Kivalina to the project site to do a survey and excavation.
"(Karl) was digging all day with the crew and then blogging at night," Hedman said.
Multimedia is a big feature of PolarTrec, which has a "virtual base camp" on its website for every project that includes scientific background, blogs, photo galleries and interactive chats. The program outfits teachers with laptops and digital and video cameras during a springtime orientation.
"Some people have their laptop hooked up to a satellite phone and they're sending short messages through the sat phone," Timm said.
Josh Dugat, a science teacher from New Orleans, called his classes from his field station in Barrow during the first week of school. He traveled around the Arctic, from the Brooks Range to Deadhorse to Barrow, studying the active layer of permafrost (the layer that thaws during the summer) with a group of geographers.
"They all had to get up at 6 a.m. so we could broadcast during second period in New Orleans," Dugat said.
The research consisted largely of poking a metal rod into the ground to determine the depth of the active layer and the temperature of the soil and compare the two. Scientists are inquiring whether the active layer is growing, a possible symptom of climate change.
"The Gulf Coast, just like the north coast, is a huge barometer for what's going on with climate change in the rest of the world. We're no strangers to the threat of rising sea level or increased hurricane frequency," Dugat said.
To relate his arctic research to students at home, Dugat will focus on the concept of subsidence. The earth is subsiding in the Gulf of Mexico as coastal land is sinking under the weight of sediment, deposited there by the Mississippi River across thousands of years. In Alaska, when active permafrost melts in the summer, it can cause buildings and other structures to shift. In both cases, engineers and builders need to take the active layer into account in their designs, Dugat said.
He is already incorporating the experience into lessons. His first day back, he asked students to use observation and inference to figure out where specimens, like a caribou jaw and antlers, had come from. He also tied it into lab safety.
"We carried 12-gauge shotguns to protect ourselves from polar bears. That gave a little water to putting goggles on in lab," Dugat said.
Teachers also are expected to share the learning with peers. Wilkening has presented at several conferences, including the Oslo Science Conference, since her trip. Dugat spoke at the scientific consortium in Barrow and at a Teach for America training event and will present at an upcoming science fair in New Orleans.
Both Dugat and Wilkening are quick to recommend PolarTrec to other teachers because of its strong organization, support and networking opportunities — not to mention the adventure and the education.
"It was a great reminder to know that the science we're teaching is being carried out worldwide at world-class levels," Dugat said. "It is still a wild world out there. Research is still very exciting, even if you're sticking a rod in the mud."