Week of November 4th

 In lab today we went over the sweater article from the previous week and talked about some of the main takeaways from it. We then talked about the law of superposition. We saw that the "deeper we dig, the further back in time we see". The newest fossil is higher up in the layer. We then saw an example of a picture of the layers of the earth and debated where we saw intrusion. We saw that the intrusion can only be as old as its newest layer. We then looked at more examples of layers of the earth and talked about the position of layers, naming them oldest to newest. We learned that when the dike comes up, it only will be flat at the top only if there is not another surface above it. We then talked about the characteric of sands. Sand can be made through different ways: water, glaciers, and wind. Sand created through water is polished, smooth, and generally similar in size. Sand created through glaciers is polished, smooth, but irregular in size. Sand created from wind is opaque, frosted, pitted, amd very fine grained. After using a microscope to see different sand textures, we made conclusions of how we thought the sand was created. We then talked about the characteristic of wind, water, and glacier erosion. 

The pressbook this week had a quick recap from last week including the layers of the earth, different plates, earthquakes, how volcanoes are formed, and tectonic plate boundaries. I thought this was helpful to remind us of what we went over last week. It then talked about the law of superposition which is what we went over in lab. It stated how the older layers of the earth are deeper. The pressbook lastly, talked about fossils. It talked about how fossils sometimes remain in the rock. This can help scientists infer when the animal/plant lived. This also helps scientists to know when certain parts of the rock was formed. Fossils help to tell a story to the people that find them. 

In lecture we did a little lab. Our lab questions was: Buoyancy/What is water displacement? We then talked about the Iowa State rock (geode) and will be using this rock during our lab.  We talked about how salt water provides buoyancy. We then tested if certain sodas was going to sink or float. The results we got were; Dr. Pepper sank (had a lot of sugar in it), Root beer sank, Mountain Dew sank, Diet coke floated ("no" sugar), and IPA floated. We then read a book called, " Archimedes and the door of science".  From the book we wanted to know; if the crown was made of pure gold?  We compares a grown and a piece of gold. We wanted to know how much silver was mixed with it. We measured their weight, and they both weighed the same thing. Gold is the most dense thing we have on the planet. We then read the middle school level book to compare. The book concluded that once people get in the bathtub the water rises.  We then went back to the crown and the piece of gold and wanted to make more investigations. We saw if they sank or floated and they both sank. We then tested the water misplacement. We filled up a beaker of water and measured the water misplacement of both the crown and piece of gold; they both went up 75. Another investigation of "filling the bathtub". We then weighed the geodes. The formula we used was; Specific gravity= W (air)/ W (air) - (W (water)). We used 2 hollow geodes for this investigation.  We then cracked open the geode to make sure we picked the hollow ones. We were correct! 

Photos:

our conclusions after viewing sand types

microscope

Superpostion example