About the ANDRILL ALCOVE: Background and Participants

BACKGROUND
ANDRILL ALCOVE is an outcome of the National Science Foundation-founded ANDRILL Project (http://www.andrill.org/ and www.andrill.org/iceberg). ANDRILL stands for ANtarctic Geological DRILLing. In ANDRILL geoscientists used a specially-designed drilling rig to collect over 1000 m of sediment core from the floor of McMurdo Sound beneath the Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica. Geoscientists will use the observations and information from the core to show how the East and West Antarctic Ice Sheets have behaved over the past 20 million years, and to help us understand how they are likely to respond to projected climate changes.

ALCOVE is a research project that uses the same key concepts as ANDRILL. We are collecting lake sediment cores by drilling through the ice (the frozen surface of the lakes), then using a simple coring device to collect a 1.5 meter sediment core from the floor of the lake (as the participants know, the length of the core varies - we encountered a few problems!) at each locality. Participating schools will be describing the core(s) they were involved in collecting. The students will use their descriptions and observations of the core to interpret the sedimentation history for the lake they are working on. Via this blog students and teachers will be able to learn about sedimentation in lakes that other schools are working on, as well as the problems being encountered and discoveries being made by other schools.

PARTICIPATING SCHOOLS
Schools and Teachers participating in this project (and the lake(s) they cored) are:
Friends School of Minnesota, St. Paul MN (Steve Moe): Crosby Lake
New Spirit Middle School, St. Paul, MN (Perdita Butler): Crosby Lake
Parker's Prairie High School, Parker's Prairie, MN (Marlene Shoeneck): Lake Adley
Osakis High School, Osakis, MN (Emily Wolf): Lake Adley
Jefferson High School, Alexandria, MN (Tom Smith): Lake Adley
Willmar Senior High School, Willmar, MN (Rob Palmer): Willmar Lake, Eagle Lake
New London-Spicer High School, New London, MN (Roxi Schmiesir): Willmar Lake, Eagle Lake
Benson High School, Benson, MN (Brian Edlund): Willmar Lake, Eagle Lake
Chetek Middle School, Chetek, WI (Mike Steiner): Lake Chetek, Bass Lake
Cromwell-Wright High School, Cromwell, MN (Lori Wester): Island Lake
Big Lake High School, Big Lake, MN (Adam Pelot): Big Lake
Coon Rapids Middle School, Coon Rapids, MN (Cheryl Sill, Kirk Enzenauer, lleila Youakim & Melissa Johnson): Crooked Lake
Earth & Atmospheric Sciences Dept., St. Cloud State University, St. Cloud, MN (Kate Pound): Goodners Lake
North Hennepin Community College, Brooklyn Park, MN (Megan Jones): Goodners Lake, Big Lake