Eagle Valley youth are floating tiny boats to learn about Arctic Ocean science exploration
Curious Nature
Lloyd Pikok/Courtesy photo
Young people in the Eagle Valley are actively learning about the Arctic Ocean by engaging with a long-term monitoring project in the Arctic. Fifth graders from Gypsum Elementary, high school students from Eagle County’s Environmental Solutions class, and families participating in the Walking Mountains STEM Family Night will participate in various activities. They will learn about Arctic Ocean currents, sea ice, research technology, and expedition planning, and they will even send small wooden boats to the North Pole to track their movements.
Local educators in Eagle Valley are collaborating with the Float Your Boat program, an outreach initiative of Dr. Ignatius Rigor and the International Arctic Buoy Program at the University of Washington. This collaboration aims to incorporate Arctic literacy into lessons and activities. Wild Rose Education, based in Carbondale, co-manages this international program, which engages educators and learners of all ages in understanding the Arctic region and its global connections.
Through this program, youth and families will decorate small 8-inch cedar boats 鈥� each with its own identifying serial number 鈥� that are subsequently deployed on Arctic sea ice alongside a drifting buoy. Each year, around 2,000 of these wooden boats are decorated across the United States (and a few other countries) to be carried on sea ice from the North Pole and found on the beaches of Iceland, Greenland, and other Nordic countries in just a few months. These scientific buoys gather environmental data such as weather conditions and GPS location, sending this information via satellite to researchers.
These data help in analyzing ocean currents, climate and weather patterns, changes in sea ice dynamics, and climate change impacts. For example, the buoys and the wooden boats have recently been carried across the Arctic Ocean and into the Greenland Sea and North Atlantic twice as fast as normal.
Researchers found that as global warming has been melting the sea ice, making it thinner, the ice blows across the Arctic Ocean more quickly. According to the , ICESat-2 and CryoSat-2/SMOS satellite data collected for the last 14 years (which is a relatively short time series) shows there is a trend toward thinner ice across most of the thicker multi-year ice of the North American Arctic, offset to some degree by a thickening trend in the Siberian Arctic, particularly in the Kara Sea.
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The wooden boats serve as a tangible connection to the Arctic, emphasizing that events occurring there affect the entire planet. According to NASA, climate change in the Arctic significantly impacts the rest of the planet as rapid melting of sea ice and glaciers contributes to rising sea levels, disrupts global weather patterns, and releases large amounts of carbon dioxide trapped in permafrost, further accelerating climate change worldwide. Essentially, the Arctic acts as a critical climate regulator due to its vast ice cover, and its warming disproportionately affects global temperatures and weather systems.
Most of the boats drift south on the Transpolar Current, east of Greenland, into the North Atlantic Ocean. The program not only engages students but also beachcombers who discover the small wooden boats on the shores of the North Atlantic, as well as Inuit hunters, sailors, and explorers in the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas.
“This is by far the funnest outreach project for the IABP team” says Dr. Rigor. “We get to work in classrooms with the next generation of scientists, and be creative and use the wooden boats to create large designs on the sea ice while we are out in the field deploying our weather stations.”
In 2024, approximately 40 of the deployed boats were reported found on beaches in Scandinavian and Nordic countries, as well as the United Kingdom. The stories surrounding these discoveries are thrilling. Those who decorate the boats are excitedly imagining their journeys, while those who find them are surprised and delighted by this unique treasure during their beach walks.
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Families who are interested in getting involved can attend STEM Family Night at the Walking Mountains Avon Tang Campus on Monday, Jan. 27, from 5:30-7:30 p.m. This free program will have educational activities for all ages and cedar boats for participants to decorate.
Wild Rose Education curates and shares these experiences through photos and stories on the website,.
