Search for: All records

Abstract Baffin Bay is the travel destination of most icebergs calving from west Greenland. They commonly follow the bay's cyclonic circulation and might end up far south along the coast of Newfoundland and Labrador, where many shipping routes converge. Given the hazard that icebergs pose to marine transportation, understanding their distribution is fundamental. One of the forces driving iceberg drift arises from the presence of sea ice. Observations in the Southern Ocean indicate that icebergs get locked in thick and concentrated sea ice. We present observations that support the occurrence of this sea ice locking mechanism (SIL) in Baffin Bay as well. Most iceberg models, however, represent the sea ice force over an iceberg as a simple drag force. Here, we implement a new parameterization in the iceberg module of the Nucleus for European Modeling of the Ocean (NEMO‐ICB) to represent SIL. We show that, by using this new parameterization, icebergs are more likely to travel outside of the Baffin Island Current during winter, which is supported by satellite observations. There is a slight improvement in the representation of iceberg severity along the coast of Newfoundland and Labrador and a slight shift of iceberg melt toward this region and Lancaster Sound/Hudson Strait. Although the impacts of icebergs on sea ice are still not represented, and targeted observations are needed for model calibration regarding sea ice concentration thresholds from which icebergs get locked, we are confident that this model improvement takes iceberg modeling one step forward toward reality. 

The concept of funds of knowledge has been widely studied in different educational contexts. Funds of knowledge are described as the historically accumulated skills, experiences, practices, and ways of knowing that develop within a household for functioning and well-being. Sometimes these include the intellectual, communicative, emotional, resistance and even spiritual resources for learning that emerge from household and community practices. As a framework, funds of knowledge is important when trying to understand the learning processes occurring at home and communities that can be transferred into any learning environment (e.g., school, museum, library, after-school program). However, there has been little discussion on how immediate role models, such as STEM summer program facilitators, can engage in eliciting the funds of knowledge of summer enrichment program participants in order to make their experiences more enriching and culturally responsive. This pilot study sought to understand how STEM facilitators, also known as pod leaders in this study, understood “funds of knowledge” as a framework and utilized it as a tool to elicit and make the most of the funds of knowledge participants (middle school students) brought to a two-week STEM summer enrichment program. The study, which is a small piece of a much larger research endeavor, primarily relied on data collected from interviews with eight individual pod leaders. The results of this study indicated that elicitation strategies are sometimes hindered by programmatic features–primarily the time constraints and subsequent lack of time for reflection–of summer enrichment programs.