Sci+Caf+Antartica

I attended the Antartica Lecture at the Teen Science Cafe on March 2. The speaker started off by allowing us to play extinction bingo where he would throw an animal up on the screen that was extinct and tell us a unique trait they had. Once we went through many bingo winners he began his lecture. He explained how he went to Antarctica for 6 months and studied the fish there. Before his journey there though, he went to Madagascar and studied the extinction of lemurs, and how their disappearance effected the trees and other wildlife there. he wanted to apply this same process to the marine ecosystems in Antartica. He explained that the Earth's rising global temperature is changing the marine ecosystem and is ruining the fishing industry. This applies to our curriculum because of our unit on extinction which involves the disappearance of a species on the planet or in a specific region, evolution because new species of fish are beginning to evolve based on Antartica's changing climate, pollution because since Antartica is a major fishing port the pollution fish are exposed to eventually will come to us, and climate change because of the rise in temperature effecting the marine ecosystems