Missed Opportunities? Don't miss another one! See http://www.ocean98.org/ for the United Nations site Ocean 1998, celebrating 1998 as the International Year of the Ocean. Educational programs are part of Ocean98 http://www.ocean98.org/hfst5.html. Your students can read "The Effects of Sodium Cyanide on Coral Reefs and Marine Fish in the Philippines", by Peter J. Rubec, http://www.actwin.com/fish/ima/cyanide.html. Originally published in 1986, this fascinating paper describes the far-reaching effects of the use of cyanide for the collection of tropical fish for aquariums.

Surf over to another international site, The GLOBE Program http://www.globe.gov/. GLOBE stands for "Global Learning and Observations to Benefit the Environment" and involves K-12 students, scientists, and teachers from 55 countries and 4,000 schools. GLOBE's U.S. team includes National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NASA, NSF, EPA, and the Departments of Education and State, working together with more than 25 state and local partner organizations. I am impressed with the interagency cooperation.

I am also impressed with the quality of the procedures GLOBE gives the students. The Hydrology/ Water Chemistry Studies section http://globe.fsl.noaa.gov/edu/exp/sw/sw1.html gives clear directions to students about data collection. Measuring Surface Water Temperature is also illustrated http://globe.fsl.noaa.gov/edu/exp/sw/gif/swtherm2.gif . Illustrations accompany descriptions of pH measurements of water with indicator paper http://globe.fsl.noaa.gov/edu/exp/sw/gif/phindic2.gif and with a pH Pen http://globe.fsl.noaa.gov/edu/exp/sw/gif/phpen2.gif.

Go to GLOBE Visualizations http://globe.gsfc.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/home.cgi to see the surface-water temperature measurements from schools throughout the world on October 12, 1996. Or you can choose the pH of surface water in Europe on whatever date you choose. Surely our students will learn that the benefit of gathering data is the combination and analysis of that data to see the big picture.

Before you dismiss The GLOBE Program because it seems to be for younger students, read what one of the participating scientists, Roger Bales, Hydrology Scientist at The University of Arizona writes to the GLOBE students http://globe.fsl.noaa.gov/scicorn/bales.html : "I teach classes in water chemistry and in global biogeochemistry. Each year I also teach University of Arizona students to do the same water quality analyses that you are doing under the GLOBE Program."

Young people do not want just to be told that things are bad - they want to be able to help make things better. Give them some tools. Go to the University of Wisconsin-Environmental Resources Center site, Give Water a Hand http://www.uwex.edu/erc/, a program for young people taking action in their community. Here you can download two free guides for beginning a water community service project in your area. Also you can contact a Give Water a Hand representative in your state by selecting your state from http://www.uwex.edu/erc/map/states.htm. As a special bonus, you have access to a great USA map.

Perhaps some of your students want to trace groundwater contamination by herbicides as part of a water community service project. Did you know that alachlor is 2-chloro-N-(2,6-diethylphenyl)-N-(methoxymethyl)acetamide? I got this information from the Herbicide Name List http://ianrwww.unl.edu/ianr/pat/herblist.htm. This collection of common and chemical names of herbicides approved by the Weed Science Society of America is part of the Pesticide Education Resources at University of Nebraska-Lincoln http://ianrwww.unl.edu/ianr/pat/ephome.htm.

Surely all this concern about the quality of our water will lead to discussions about the nature of water solutions. See Carmen Giunta's Classic Chemistry Page from Le Moyne College http://maple.lemoyne.edu/~giunta/index.html for papers on electrochemistry and electrolyte solutions http://maple.lemoyne.edu/~giunta/papers.html#elec , which links to the ChemTeam site http://dbhs.wvusd.k12.ca.us/Chem-History/Classic-Papers-Menu.html . This Classic Papers site is from John L. Park of Diamond Bar High School. Introduce your students to original papers by Arrhenius and Brønsted and more. By the way, I found my way to The Classic Chemistry Page using my favorite search enginegoing to a great home page. This time I started with the home page of Steve Lower at Simon Fraser University http://www.sfu.ca/chemcai/.