WEEKLY BLOG

BLOG:

This week in earth environmental science:

We had a long 4-day holiday so we arrived on school on Tuesday. The entire student body was refreshed and ready for a week of learning!

The week started with a discussion about what would happen if the earth was not tilted on its axis?  The class produced some enthusiastic answers. Soon we began with our lesson for that day - an overview/summary of the layers of the atmosphere and their significance. They are as follows:

Troposphere: where weather occurs, most dense

Stratosphere: contains UV blocking Ozone layer

Mesosphere: second layer - less dense then the stratosphere

Thermosphere: blocks x-ray radiation, where the aurora light occur

Exosphere: least dense layer

After learning about the atmosphere we began talking about the formation of Hadley cells (A large-scale atmospheric convection cell in which air rises at the equator and sinks at medium latitudes).  We closed out the day with a discussion of the Intertropical convergence zone (ITCZ) and how an area within that zone would have increased rainfall.

 On Wednesday we began by learning about the corealis winds: Coriolis effect is a deflection of moving objects when they are viewed in a rotating reference frame.  We then did a lab to show the class the effects of the winds: we used a turntable and markers to draw the trajectories of the “lines across the globe”, it was fun and exciting!   We also began talking bout “el Niño and La Nina” a result of the corealis effect they are changes in the direction of currents/wind. We saw how gyers (large pacific ocean currents affect the temperature of water, and upwelling:  a phenomenon that allows nutrient rich water to flow from the bottom of the ocean to the surface (good for fish) we also saw the effects that El Niño and la Nina had on countries and people.

On Thursday we watched a video describing the process of rain shadow. Most of the class time was spent by learning about the similarities of different organism in various biomes, despite may of the organism not being genetically related they all seemed to form similar adaptations to survive their special climates.

Finally at the end of the week we discussed and learned about ecosystems evenness and ecosystem richness. More specifically we learned how to calculate the richness of an area by using Shannon’s index… a long and complicated formula.  Thus ends another productive week in the classroom of Mr. Kite! My horizon and knowledge-sphere has certainly gone to the next level J

Citations: 
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