ADI Glacier Lab Investigation

23900535
Introduction and Guiding Question
Global warming has had a lot of effects on our world today. One is the
temperature. The temperature varies every year fluctuating. Global warming has
affected glaciers a lot. Due to these rapid temperature changes, now only ten percent of
Earth's surface is covered with these vast sheets of ice. Due to global warming, some
years there is very little snow, causing the size of the glaciers to decrease. This
decrease of size in the glaciers may cause temperature changes. When theres more
snow than other years, more glaciers might start to form due to snow compacting on top
of each other. For our project, our goal was to find out the effect on a glacier when you
change the snowfall. The guiding question we had was How do climate conditions
affect the size of a glacier?
Method
Throughout the whole simulation, we held the temperature at 61.5 degrees
Fahrenheit. In the beginning of the experiment, we left the snowfall at 0 feet. Each time
25 years passed, we would pause the simulation and measure the width, length, and
temperature of the glacier. We repeated this method until we got to 3 feet of snow.
Through this we found out that the more snowfall there was, the bigger the width and
length of the glacier got. We put our data on a data table. On the data table, we put
down the snowfall, length, width, and the temperature. We analyzed our data by looking
for trends in the data set. We observed a relationship between snowfall and the size of
a glacier

The Argument
Our claim for our experiment was the more snowfall there is, the bigger the
length and width of a glacier will get. Our data clearly supports our claim. when we first
started our simulation, we started at 0 feet of snow. We noticed that the length and
width of the glacier remained at zero. After 25 years had passed we put the snowfall at
1 foot of snow. The length of the glacier increased to 242.5ft and the width of the
glacier increased to 603.87ft. Global warming has had an effect on the size of the
glacier. Global warming causes temperatures to rise and be warm. The way global
warming can cause an effect on glaciers is the temperature can get warm and cause
the size of the glacier to shrink. Not only this, but the snow will melt, and as you saw
from the data collected, the less snowfall, the smaller the glacier. If these mass objects
of ice melt, the amount of water in bodies of water will rise. If the amount of water
increases in bodies of water, flooding will occur. This is a reason why global warming
should be addressed. In conclusion, the more snowfall there is, the bigger in length and
width a glacier will get.
Snowfall

0Ft

1 Ft

2 Ft

3 Ft

Length

242.5 Ft

63,287 Ft

76,246 Ft

Width

603.87 Ft

711 Ft

793.3 Ft

Temperature

7.2*F

12.4*F

13.26*F

18.1*F