Talks and experiments to think about "Earth Science, MOSAiC and Climate Change"
How do we study our Planet? Why does the Earth have now fever? What is climate change and how can we understand it? With the help of stories from her MOSAiC adventure, some lab materials and a lot of enthusiasm, Francesca aimed at providing students with tools to answer these questions themselves.
Profile photo by Sam Cornish
The Earth is such a complex system that more people are needed to understand it and find ways to take care of it. The natural conclusion of these thoughts was for Francesca to bring her amazing MOSAiC experience into the classrooms. Even though she works in Germany, she decided to carry out her project in her home land, Italy, where she hopes to have inspired some young minds to be curious about the Earth System.
Francesca presenting at the Giordano Bruno School on 7 January 2020 (Photo by Alvise Varagnolo).
Francesca spoke with students in the age of 14-18 and answered their questions about what it means to study Natural Sciences and what are the different methods used. In the frame of the MOSAiC expedition, she described how challenging but at the same time how intriguing and important is to study the physics, biology and chemistry of the Arctic.
Examples of Francesca's slides on the MOSAiC project (Screenshot courtesy of Francesca Doglioni).
In a second phase of the project, she talked about the scientific processes behind climate change, and helped the students to experience themselves how they work by means of hands on experiments.
Set up and concept or experiments Francesca used to demonstrate ocean circulation (credits to Francesca Doglioni).
These experiments can be easily replicated at home, please find the worksheets here in Italian, English or German! Of course, the text itself can be readapted to your needs. The same experiments are now planned to be performed in Germany with the help of colleagues from the Alfred Wegener Institute during future public science events, namely the Zukunfstag (26 March 2020) and the World Ocean Day (6 June 2020).
Apart from her main project, Francesca tried to reach out as much as possible with the message of MOSAiC, by mean of newspaper (il Gazzettino) and radio (Radio Popolare) interviews.
