Ten Hundred Words of Science

Understanding change at the top of the world so we’ll know what is going to happen later

When we drive cars and warm our homes we give out bad stuff that ends up in the air. The bad stuff in the air makes our world warmer, which is not good. Every year there is more bad stuff in the air, and our world gets a little bit warmer. Some people pretend this is not happening, they are wrong.

The green things that live outside suck up the bad stuff in the air that we give out when we drive our cars and use it to grow bigger. This is good because the green things are slowing down the warming of our world. When the green things die, tiny life forms in the ground eat them and return the bad stuff back to the air, this is normal.

Up near the top of the world it is really cold and lots of old dead green things have been stuck in ice in the ground for a very long time. When the dead green things are stuck in ice the tiny life forms can’t eat them and the bad stuff is stuck where it can’t make the world hotter. When ice gets warmed up it starts to go away and when it does the tiny life forms in the ground can eat the old dead green things and give out the bad stuff that makes our world warmer. When the world gets warmer more ice goes away, more dead green stuff gets eaten and more bad stuff ends up in the air which makes the world get warmer, and so on. This could make the world get hotter very quickly, and we need to know more about it.

To help work out what might happen at the top of the world years from now we are trying to understand as much as we can about the way the ice goes away, the green things that grow outside and the tiny life forms that eat them. When we know some more about this stuff we can put what we have learnt in a big thinking box (a bit like the one you are using to read this) and use it to tell us what will happen years from now.