Week 11 - Sand, Geodes, Erosion

Week 11: Sand, Geodes, Erosion

river bank erosion
Courtesy of: Mick Garratt, https://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/565767


News/Introduction

We started this week with a quick pedagogical reflection on the sweater articles that we read last week. A big question that we have to ask is how does this apply to teaching and learning? It is important that we let students explore topics to help them with their scientific understanding.

For the first part of our lab experience, we looked at sand collected from different sources through telescopes:



We then looked at geodes for the second part of today's lab experience. We learned about Archimedes Law with respect to geodes. (W(air)/W(air)-W(water)). This is an equation for specific gravity. For geodes, if the specific gravity of the geode in question is less than 2.7, the geode is hollow. The lower the specific gravity, the more hollow the geode is. If the specific gravity is 2.7 or more, the geode is not hollow. 

My partner and I picked a rock, we opened it up, and ours was decently hollow!



New Discoveries

We learned about Archimedes Law to help us determine the specific gravity of geodes.  However, for our discussion, we learned about weathering and erosion. To start, we looked at the crystal caves in Mexico. These caves have formed underground (intrusive igneous) and the area is hot!

With wind erosion, this type of erosion only moves small particles, but "eats away" larger particles. There are two key aspects to wind erosion that define this: the creation of wind shadows and wind "carving" the earth.

But looking at sand, we can see that sand comes from a variety of sources, it's not just washed up on the beach. In fact, sand can have three main characteristics. If the sand is created from water, the sand is smooth, polished, and similar in size. If the sand is from glaciers, it is polished, smooth, but it's irregular in size. Finally, sand created by wind is opaque, frosted, pitted, and very fine grained.

Water is a powerful form of erosion and are classified by "age" (in this case, "age" refers to the energy of the water source). Younger rivers have high energy and tear the land - this is due to energy from gravity. Older rivers move side to side, and carry sediment (think the Mississippi). A "mature" river is a combination of the two.

Glacier erosion (Mountain and Continental) helps move huge particles. In fact, glacier erosion is the cause of many of the land formations in the state of Iowa. These glaciers were continental glaciers from Canada, and leveled the land to create areas like the Driftless region of the Midwest. Mountain glaciers created the features that we see in areas like the Rockies. These glaciers make a "U-shaped" valley that acts as a bulldozer.

Connections

When we learned about Archimedes Law, we learned about tying this into children's books. We can use anchor texts (like what I have discussed in Lit 2) to help us introduce this topic - another valuable pedagogical tool to use.

Where does our talk on geodes and erosion tie into the real world. We can use the Law we learned to go geode hunting ourselves. Just because an alleged geode feels hollow doesn't mean that it is hollow. But we also discovered that sand comes from a variety of sources and is not the same throughout the world. Some sand even carries a story - For example, the black sand beaches of Hawaii are allegedly cursed. If one takes sand from the beach, bad things happen to them. In face, our instructor stated that Hawaii receives black sand in the mail from people who were "cursed."

The Future

For next week we will discuss the film After the Flood starring Leonardo DiCaprio as we start our exploration into the climate unit. 

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