Plate Tectonics!

I've just spent a half hour looking at photos of Iceland. Once again, I have a huge itch to go and visit there.

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Here are some links to sites with paleo maps:

Paleogeographic Atlas Project

Palaeos

Continental Drift Movie

There are some animations on these sites, but I'm still not sure I've found the original ones which Farmerman remembers.

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littlek wrote:

I've just spent a half hour looking at photos of Iceland. Once again, I have a huge itch to go and visit there.

Better hurry. No telling how long it'll last.

Oh, and look up Lackner Scrat while you're there?

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That'd be fun. Turns out Dasha wants to go there too. Maybe in 5 years we can both afford a trip over.

I am posting, here, a rambling email I wrote a while back. Please disregard.

From April 18, 2007

Quote:

Very Rough Draft of potential lesson plans (and guiding Qs)

Guiding questions:
1.How do plate tectonics cause mountain building?
2.How do plate tectonics affect volcanic activity?
3.How do plate tectonics affect earthquakes?
4.How do plate tectonics affect the ocean floor?
5.How have plate tectonics made the Earth appear as it does today?
6.In what ways does Plate Tectonics effect humans?

Lesson 1: Pangaea, Continental Cut-Out. Arrange continents on outline maps (which show directionality of plates) at different stages of the Earth's history. Predict, after looking at directionality the where the continents might end up. Students draw their own line-maps at different stages of Earth's potential future.

Lesson 2: The Plates, Cooking up Convection. First students use the hot vs cold water in jars to see convection. Then teacher models tea light, oil, dye and styrofoam bits.

Lesson 3: The Ocean, Highest (rifts and volcanoes), Deepest (trenches), Flattest (Abyssal Plain), graphing the highest and lowest points on land and in the oceans as well as the space in between - cross section including real data from deepest and highest points.

Lesson 4: The Ocean floor - pushing or pulling? Students theorize about what is making the seafloor move. Is it being pushed apart by the mid-oceanic rift or is it being pulled in my the slab subduction? No right answer - except for anyo9ne who might say both.

Lesson 5: The Ocean - Deep sea video - Pillows and vents? Students research and present reports on hydrothermal vents, pillows and or other lava flows. How are they formed? Where are they formed? Who lives there? How?

Lesson 6: Mountains, the various processes

Lesson 7: Volcanoes, types shield, cinder, dome

Lesson 8: Earthquakes, Who's at Fault? Tsunami, san andreas, good ol' new england....

Lesson 9: How does all this effect us humans? Danger of earthquakes, resources such as oil, ore, fertile soils

Lesson 10:

** page break **

Pangaea:
-How it began
-why did the plates break up and start moving? (convection in earth)
-where did they move? Where will they move?
-What was going on under the seas? Did the plates just scrape along on the sea floor? What would you expect to see there if that was the case? Not flat! The sea floor is part of the earth's crust and was moving in it's own way.

Oceanography: http://www.divediscover.whoi.edu/teachers.html
Activities: convection activity. Students can do a hot vs cold water jar sytem (with one jar having dyed liquid) and or the teacher can do a hot oil activity to show the floating land.
-ridge systems - pillow lava, spread, magnetism, Iceland
-subduction zones - deep-sea life, depth, ALVIN(?) video,
-hotspots - Hawaiian islands,
-Relative mountain sizes between HI islands, Mt Everest, Mid-Atlantic ridge, for example
-Relative depth diffs between the grand canyon, death valley, ocean tenches.

Mountains:
-uplifting - plates crashing together
-volcanic - hotspots, shield, cinder, etc volcanoes, lava flows and gases, dormant volcanoes
-wind and water erosion and glaciers, change the face of a mountain (and height)
-mountains change weather patterns and create fertility below.

1.Pangaea and the moving plates - why did they start to move?
2.earth as is today and asit will be in the future
3.plate movement under water (oceanography)
4.plate movement effects on land (mountains)
5.erosion effects on landscape

Should we include erosion?
Rock types are outside of this lesson.

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littlek wrote:

That'd be fun. Turns out Dasha wants to go there too. Maybe in 5 years we can both afford a trip over.

I am posting, here, a rambling email I wrote a while back. Please disregard.

From April 18, 2007

Quote:
Very Rough Draft of potential lesson plans (and guiding Qs)

Some additional questions:

1. What causes the stable "hot spots" which sometimes puncture the crust (The Hawaiian Island chain for example)?

2. Are there additional structures within the Earth's interior which have yet to be identified and understood?

3. Does fluid magma form 'solid' structures under extreme preassure?

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Ros, I think maybe those Qs are a little too advanced for 5th graders. This stuff is really addressed in earnest in middle school. What I have up there in my quote is probably too advanced already.

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littlek wrote:

Ros, I think maybe those Qs are a little too advanced for 5th graders. This stuff is really addressed in earnest in middle school. What I have up there in my quote is probably too advanced already.

I didn't know your original Q's were for 5th graders. But I wouldn't understimate them. I lacked certain knowledge at 10 years old that I have now, but in many ways I think I was actually smarter than I am now.

Like many kids, I still remember asking my geography teacher if South America and Africa ever fit together, and that was before plate tectonics was known (early 1970's).

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Good one! I'd push the knowledge in the classroom. But, for my class, I need to go by the book (the book being the MA state standards for science).

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littlek wrote:

Good one! I'd push the knowledge in the classroom. But, for my class, I need to go by the book (the book being the MA state standards for science).

As far as I know, the question of whether there are other 'structures' within the earth's fluid interior has never been asked before. It just seems to me to be an intuitive answer to why 'hot spots' remain relatively stable as the plates move above them.

So there are no answers to the questions I posed (as far as I know). One of your questions also had a 'no right answer' provision.

Good luck with the 5th graders. Most of them may be overwhelmed with the questions, but there may be an unrecognizable few in the bunch who will carry the challenge through their lives. You never know.

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Interesting idea - a structure which focuses the hotspot?

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A suggestion--Why not start with how did the theory of Plate Tectonics begin? How did it collect evidence .

. SOme major areas
. How does plate tectonics effect climate (ocean currents are weather engines and plates direct them)

.How does plate tectonics affect the existence of organisms through time (Get into biogeography-why do certain animals only occur in certain areas and in vcertain times (The kids could have fun making maps of where related animal species lived and then trace the geography back to a Pamgea like land

. Evidence of plate tectonics

Alfred Wegener (a weatherman) first speculated on how well the continents of N America S America v Europe and Africa Fit together.
He then noted that on one half of a plate the land seems like it was "part of a trailing edge" and at the other end it seemed like there was a "leading edge" full of tectonic activity and Pyroclastic volcanism

.This may be too arcane but How many periods of plate tectonics have we evidence for (at least 3 major ones before Pangea)

.Plate tectonics and the occurences of natural resources and minerals

.Plate tectonics and "belts of mountain ranges that seemed torn apart by drifting continents)

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littlek wrote:

Interesting idea - a structure which focuses the hotspot?

I'm guessing that there are semi-solid formation within the fluid interior which occur at certain transitional layers based on pressure levels.

I once read something about the atmospheric layers of Jupiter and Saturn which produce semi-solid plasmas depending on pressure, and I realized that all fluid systems probably work the same way, just at different transition pressures. Solidity is an illusion for the most part, almost everything is 'fluid' to a certain degree, just a matter of viscosity.

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Farmerman, you're getting into high school topics!

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Ros, how do the semi-solid formations effect the hotspots?

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ros and farmerman - I posted my quoted info on the last page because I was having issues with my classmate and professor. I wanted to keep it here as a back up. More info on my teechur thread, if you're interested. I gotta goto bed.

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littlek wrote:

Ros, how do the semi-solid formations effect the hotspots?

I don't know. I don't know if they even exist. I'm at the limit of my imagination. I think we need a 5th grader to take it from here Smile

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NO IM not. You havent even explained to the kids what plate Tectonics IS and how we know what we know. You gotta have the basics driven home.

Like Ill bet your using 2D paper maps. Mid ocean ridges and "Rings of fire" only make sense when you plot them on a bunch of balloons . Id give a kid a globe and then cut out the continents and fit them bvack together to show how closely they fit. This will only work on a globe because on a map it appears that the continents have to make weird turns. Think like the stitches on a baseball.

As far as climate and animals , these are part of the results of plate tectonics, you cant just give the kids a bunch of facts and then dont stay around to answer why or how they can intuit the information themselves.(or why we see only certain animals on certain parts of the earth and then we see similar but unrelated animals elsewhere)
Ive presented plate tectonics to elementary kids in aassemblies and , while I had some Powerpoint crap, I also had a series of huge blow up globes that you could get from Carolina Supply. SHowing kids how Wegener first had this idea would make sense to a kid. They think waay outside of boxes. We dont get uncreative until someone teaches us to give up on our imaginations.

Find a lava lamp and get itwarmed up while your talking. The plate movements are similar to what makes lava lamps work.
I think "hotspot" tectonics is still abit advanced for 5th graders, because its not intuitive. Places like Hawaii and Snake River , and the Afar are all hotspot mechanisms and each has its own geometry and types of vulcanism that are totally untrealted to each other. (Ophiolitic v crustal)

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Farmerman, did you look at my quoted material on the last page?

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Convesction currents are important. I have two activities, one the kids do and one the teacher has to do (open flame) on convection currents. I like the idea of doing the continental cut-outs on a globe, but I'm not sure how that would work. magnets?

I do want to do an activity to wrap up where kids can think about how the plate tectonics effects the world we know today. Now I have to narrow down my lessons to 5, not 10. I dunno how much I can cover in 5 lessons. These are supposed to be focused and tight on a single theme. I truly believe in the connection between geo-science and culture, and biodiversity (or lack thereof). I just don't know how much I can add to this set of lesson plans.

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littlek wrote:

Farmerman, you're getting into high school topics!

Here are the MA state standards for science education from pre-k through high school. I have to use these for my lesson plans whether I like it or not. Page 112 starts the Earth and Space science section. Grades 3-5, section 12 is what we were going to use as our base.

http://www.doe.mass.edu/frameworks/scitech/1006.pdf

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