Integrating Eyjafjallajökull

Second fissure, viewed from the north, on 2 April 2010 (from Wikipedia)

Current events often generate the teachable moments we’re always seeking in order to strike students’ imagination. The eruption of Eyjafjallajökull is a prime example. I’ve already used it to point out the intersection of geothermal energy and plate tectonics, but there is so much more.

The second eruption in Eyjafjallajökull. Seen from Fljótshlíð on 20 April 2010 (from Wikipedia).

Eyjafjallajökull has been a wonderful subject for the art of photography. The image above is a great example but the time-lapse photos have been excellent. The photo to the right captures not just the stars streaking across the sky with a three minute exposure but the fiery red arcs of the volcanic ejecta.

The MODIS instrument on NASA's Aqua satellite captured an ash plume from Eyjafjallajökull Volcano over the North Atlantic at 13:20 UTC on 17 April 2010 (from NASA via Wikipedia).

One of the major benefits of the space program so far has been its Earth observing satellites. There is so much going on in the image to the left that it’s hard to know where to start. Why are there all those clouds over Iceland? (warmer land mass creates convection); what’s with the two plumes from the volcano, one concentrated high level and one disperse low level plume; fjords on the upwind side of the island and the straightened coastline on the lee; greenish plumes of glacier-ground, rock flour discharging into the ocean.

Dust particles suspended in the atmosphere scatter light from the setting sun, generating 'volcanic lavenders' like this one over the flight path of Leeds-Bradford Airport in England during the aviation shutdown. (from Wikipedia).

The dinosaurs were done in either by an asteroid impact in the Yucatan or the eruption of the massive flood volcanoes in Deccan, India, or quite probably both. Both of these events launched an enormous amount of ash, gas and fine particles into the upper atmosphere, blocking sunlight, causing global cooling. Well the ash from Eyjafjallajökull and the sulfur dioxide gas may be having a similar effect on Europe, and if there’s enough of it, on the world. The 1992 eruption of Mt. Pinatubo cooled the globe by about half a degree Celsius.

Montessorian on the web: Dr. Sarah Baird

Sarah Baird, from the Sea Pines Montessori Academy‘s Middle School, has recently started posting articles on K-12 education at Savannah K-12 Examiner. Dr. Baird was a research scientist (chemistry) before getting into Montessori so she’s not afraid to delve into the scientific literature to support her articles, yet her writing is targeted to a general audience.

“I am doing it to write (because I love it) and educate teachers and parents outside Montessori about our philosophy…. I feel like Montessorians keep all the info to themselves. We need to share and be proud to even have a little positive impact on our public schools,” Sarah Baird (2010) personal communication.

Having been blogging here for a few months I can say I greatly appreciate this sentiment, especially since one of the things I’ve been most impressed about with the Montessori approach is how it encapsulates so much of the modern pedagogy about constructivist education.

Score one for adding another intelligent voice with a Montessori perspective to the web.

Hydrogen fuel

Hydrogen is an alternative source of fuel (alternative to fossil fuels), but it can be produced from renewable or non-renewable sources. PBS and Scientific American Frontiers have a nice video on hydrogen fuel. They first visit a lab producing hydrogen fuel cells. The second part of the program visits Iceland is trying to use geothermal energy to create the hydrogen. They also discuss producing hydrogen from solar-electric and algae.

Geothermal energy and plate tectonics

Major tectonic plates (from USGS).
Seafloor topography around the Hawaiian Hotspot (from NCDC)
Seafloor topography around the Hawaiian Hotspot (from NOAA)

The question came up about where are good places for geothermal energy, and the answer, of course, was to introduce plate tectonics. It was a quick introduction, and a refresher for the 8th graders, but the interest was there and it seemed impactful.

It also provided a link to talk about the Icelandic volcano that’s been disrupting air traffic in Europe. NASA has an amazing picture of the eruption on its Picture of the Day for April 19th.

Google Maps is a great tool for showing features like the mid-ocean ridges (use the satellite view), zooming in and out of the mountain ranges, tracing the Hawaii hotspot and watching East Africa split apart.

[googleMap name=”Mozambique Channel” description=”East African Rifting” width=”400″ height=”350″ mapzoom=”4″ mousewheel=”false” directions_to=”false”]-21, 40[/googleMap]

Oil traps and deltas in the sandbox

Red and green sand added for marker beds.

The sandbox was built to be a wave tank so we could look at interference patterns and wave properties. But if you tilt it a little, and put in a few holes on the lower end, you can get sandbox to look at the formation of streams, deltas and the sedimentary layering that traps oil and natural gas.

Using the holes at the bottom end the students started with a low “sea-level”, raised it and lowered it. At the end of the run, they drained all the water and sliced the tank to see the depositional layers in cross-section.

We added red and green sand to try to make marker beds before each change in base level. The marker beds worked reasonably well, but it would have been better to have sand with different densities that could be sorted by the stream flow and depositional environment. It also helps to get the colored sand wet, to make a slurry, otherwise the grains will float on the water.

The shifting lobes of the delta showed up very well (see the animation) and some nice river features showed up as well. What I want to do sometime is to have students build coastlines and have waves erode them away creating typical coastal features.

My students were even able to demonstrate the tank for their presentation, because it really only takes half an hour to get all the features if you know what you’re aiming for.

Sources

The exercise these results are based on is posted as The Geology of Oil Traps Activity.

Poetry for adolescents

I’m always a little suspicious of things titled as “for adolescents” or similar, because they tend to satisfy someone’s memory of being young and don’t necessarily provide what adolescents actually need. Of course I’m guilty of the same bias but I do take some effort be aware and to be critical of my own choices because of it. That said, I listened to a couple of poems from Elise Paschen’s compilation of poetry for adolescents, “Poetry Speaks Who I Am: Poems of Discovery, Inspiration, Independence and Everything Else” on NPR’s Morning Edition today and some of them are pretty good.

The poetry anthology comes with a CD, and Paschen reads a few on the program. She also goes on to talk about the poems a little, giving a good example about how to respond to poetry. The first poem they discuss on the program, Rita Dove’s Flash Cards, though written from the point of view of a younger student, is quite good. There are also a couple of poems on the NPR article.

Since we’re still having poetry presentations in the morning I think it would be useful to play part of this interview to help shape the discussion.

Steam distillation

Steam distillation apparatus.

We’re talking about the carbon cycle and the production of fossil fuels, so I though it would be interesting to try extracting oils from plants, to demonstrate that it can be done. So one of my small groups put together a steam distillation apparatus using stuff that we had at hand and a length of copper tubing that we picked up at the hardware store.

We tried extracting the essential oils from lemon balm, because it grows like a weed here and even this early in the spring I have too much of it in the back yard (the middle school does not yet have an herb garden).

The distiller apparatus worked fairly well itself. Our improvised cooling chamber was a towel with ice in it draped over the copper tube. The melted ice-water would wick up the towel and evaporate as the water cooled the copper tube. You could see the steam rising off the the towel, an excellent example of phase changes in water resulting from transfers of energy.

We did not get any nice oil separation in the distillate, probably because we did not use enough lemon balm, but we got wonderfully fragrant water (in the flask on the left side of the picture). The water left behind in the pot also turned an ugly brown and looked a bit like crude oil (or tea) at least in a test tube.

Planes versus the volcano

CO2 emissions by Planes or Volcano, by David McCandless

David McCandless’ graphic showing the amount of CO2 emitted by the European airline industry compared to the amount emitted by the volcano that shut down that industry for several days is beautiful in its simplicity. It seems that despite the fact that volcanoes emit a lot of CO2, the volcanic eruption reduced total emissions of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.