High-School Girls Climb 19,000 Feet for Answers to Global Warming; Maryland Prep School Students Perform Groundbreaking Research of Glacial Melting On Ecuador's Mount Cayambe

Business Wire, July 10, 2003

Business Editors/Science Writers/Environment Writers

BOURNE, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--July 10, 2003

Sky-high in on one of Ecuador's tallest volcanic mountain peaks, a group of high-school girls recently set out to learn more about the impact of climate on glacial melting in the Tropics - a phenomenon some scientific experts link to global warming. Ret Talbot, a teacher at Oldfields School in Maryland, led the 12-member, all-girl team on the INTI 2003 Expedition, a three-week scientific mountaineering expedition to Mount Cayambe in Ecuador as part of the school's experiential education program.

"Glaciers in the tropics are melting at an alarming rate," explains Talbot. "Since global warming may be a factor, collecting good meteorological data is extremely important in understanding the effect weather may have on the situation. One of the primary objectives of our expedition was to collect baseline weather data on Cayambe, which would later be analyzed and compared with GPS data on glacier geometry to help explain how weather affects glaciers and stream flow in their drainage basins."

According to Talbot, Cayambe makes for an ideal "classroom without walls", and has the distinction of being the highest point through which the Equator passes anywhere on the face of the earth. He explains that no other expedition has ever seriously studied glacial recession on Mount Cayambe to date - a fact that he feels has heightened the significance of the study in the student's minds.

To collect weather data, the group used a HOBO(R) Weather Station donated by iScienceProject, a program sponsored by Cape Cod-based Onset Computer Corporation. iScienceProject is aimed at boosting science and math scores by offering K-12 students a fun, hands-on learning experience with data loggers and weather stations. "From the start, I felt that there was a good synergy in terms of philosophy between iScienceProject and the INTI 2003 Expedition," Talbot explains. "It's all about getting students fired up about experiments, and tools like data loggers and weather stations really generate a lot of enthusiasm both inside and outside of the classroom. They tap into the creative learning process, and as soon as everyone becomes a vested partner in that, education happens."

As one of four major partners of the INTI 2003 Expedition - along with Hewlett Packard, GoLite, and Leica Geosystems - iScienceProject supplied the battery-powered weather station along with a number of individual plug-in "smart sensors" for measuring and recording various weather parameters including air temperature, precipitation, photosynthetic light, wind speed and direction, and barometric pressure.

"We needed to be able to deploy the weather station at over 15,000 feet, so the fact that the HOBO unit is battery-powered was a huge advantage for us," says Talbot. "It was also lightweight enough for us to transport to the base camp, and rugged enough to withstand the harsh conditions up there."

To offload the collected data, students were able to easily connect the weather station to a Hewlett Packard iPAQ laptop computer running BoxCar Pro(R), Onset's data graphing and analysis software program. With a few clicks of a mouse button, the software instantly translated the collected data into easy-to-read graphs, which clearly marked out spikes and drops in the various weather parameters that were measured. The Expedition team was able to view the graphs on the laptops and print them out using printers supplied by HP.

"It was always amazing to look at the color printouts of the weather station data," says Jennifer Wolf, an Oldfields senior and INTI 2003 expedition member. "It's one thing to be up all night trying to keep your tent up in a storm, but to be able to look at the wind graphs on the laptops the next morning was really cool and made the experience so much more educational."

Although having laptops on hand providing the group with instant gratification in terms of viewing the data, Talbot feels that the weather data will be most valuable over the long-term. "We're committed to a five-year project on Cayambe, and we'll have a much better view of things after studying the baseline data over this period."

The INTI 2003 Expedition group is now back in the U.S. and processing the massive amounts of data that was collected. The next expedition is scheduled for November 2003, when four INTI faculty members will attempt to hike the length of the Rio Blanco to its headwaters at the INTI study site on Cayambe.

"What we accomplished this year on Cayambe was beyond our expectations, but it is just a drop in the bucket in terms of our overall goals," Talbot adds. "Continuing to work with partners like iScienceProject with whom we share a common philosophy will be essential to our success next year. Through continued collaboration, we are confident that we can continue to expand the horizons of science-based experiential education while at the same time give back to the country of Ecuador."