Middle and High School … from a Montessori Point of View
I appreciate how much you more of the weather you can observe using time lapse photography, but its astonishing when you don’t even need the time lapse.
While this storm seems like something out of the movie “Day After Tomorrow”, I wonder how much more freaky weather we’re seeing just because of the new ubiquity of video cameras.
Mortar shells landing on concrete create a pattern almost like a floral arrangement. In Sarajevo, after the Bosnian War, the mortar scars in the sidewalks were filled in with red resin. The results are called Sarajevo Roses.
Flickr has a nice map that links to Rose pictures in downtown Sarajevo.
I found out about these from reading a recent set of View From Your Window Contest entries on Andrew Sullivan’s blog.
There’s a nice article in the New York Times on the fact that oil, petroleum, did not come form dead dinosaurs, but rather from the microscopic plankton that died and fell to the ocean floor.
The idea that oil came from the terrible lizards that children love to learn about endured for many decades. The Sinclair Oil Company featured a dinosaur in its logo and in its advertisements, and outfitted its gas stations with giant replicas that bore long necks and tails. The publicity gave the term “fossil fuels” new resonance. – Broad, 2010
It’s easy to forget how pervasive is the idea that oil comes from dinosaurs. Broad’s article is a nice reminder that:
Today, a principal tenet of geology is that a vast majority of the world’s oil arose not from lumbering beasts on land but tiny organisms at sea. It holds that blizzards of microscopic life fell into the sunless depths over the ages, producing thick sediments that the planet’s inner heat eventually cooked into oil. It is estimated that 95 percent or more of global oil traces its genesis to the sea. – Broad, 2010
How do we know?
[I]n the 1930s. Alfred E. Treibs, a German chemist, discovered that oil harbored the fossil remains of chlorophyll, the compound in plants that helps convert sunlight into chemical energy. The source appeared to be the tiny plants of ancient seas. – Broad, 2010
We tend to find a lot of oil in the deltas of the great rivers because the rivers provide nutrients for the microorganisms to survive and layers of sand and clay sediments that trap the oil and natural when they’re produced.
The article also ties the location of oil production to the geography of plate tectonics.
[W]hen Africa and South America slowly pulled apart in the Cretaceous period, forming the narrow beginnings of the South Atlantic. Big rivers poured in nutrients. A biological frenzy on the western shores of the narrow ocean ended up forming the vast oil fields now being discovered and developed off Brazil in deep water. – Broad, 2010
WORLDMAPPER has a nice interactive map that shows you how the population is distributed within different countries. The map above, of the United States, really shows how most of the population is located in the big cities. This map is a bit abstract, so I’m curious to see my students interpret it.
The BBC has a nice article explaining these maps, which includes animations showing how the maps were deformed.
A Tired Ball Speaks from THE AMEN PROJECT on Vimeo.
I remember playing the game with a rolled up spheroid of aluminum foil. For kids living in poverty in the developing world something as simple as a soccer ball is an expensive luxury. Jessica Hilltout has a coffee table book out called “Amen: Grassroots Football“, with photographs of the “balls” she’s seen used in Africa. The video above has just a small selection.
The pictures speak to, and help explain, the popularity of soccer around the world. Unfortunately, I’m not quite sure how to order the book, but the website does allow you to look inside.
In the coming year we’ll be looking at inequalities in wealth around the world. One way of looking at this is via the two maps above from the WORLDMAPPER website. Countries are scaled by the population, in the first image, and wealth in the second.
Worldmapper also has quite the number of very interesting maps, including maps related to health, violence, pollution, food and ecology. The species at risk map ties in well with the study of the Earth’s resources.
They also distribute some animated maps as well as free software, called ScapeToad, that you can use to make your own maps. I like the fact that their maps and software are clearly licensed and allow free educational use.
The caves at Meramec were created in dissolved carbonate rocks; that’s how most caves with interesting cave formation form. The recent storms in Guatemala, along with leaky sewage pipes, have helped speed the dissolution process producing some devastating sinkholes.
[googleMap name=”Guatemala City” description=”Guatemala City” width=”450″ height=”400″ mapzoom=”4″ mousewheel=”false”]Guatemala City[/googleMap]
I had not particularly wanted to go up into the St. Louis Arch myself, but the students really wanted to and we had a little time to spare after the Science Museum. So I grabbed tickets for the last tram to the top, and I’m glad I did. Looking down on the city and river from above you could, in an almost tactile way, reconcile the geographic elements with the history that we’d talked so much about at Anheuser-Busch.
Standing in line, waiting for the tram to the top, we were treated to a short documentary on the Eads Bridge, the first across the Mississippi in St. Louis. The video stressed the importance of the bridge in allowing the city to become the gateway for westward expansion.
The tram arrived and small rectangular doors opened up to reveal tiny escape pods fit for a spaceship. Five of us squeezed in, fortunately we were all friendly. The distinct possibility of claustrophobia tinged the air. Three minutes 47 seconds later we reached the top. Forty-five degree rain was pouring down outside. The wind was so strong you could, if you held still and waited for it, feel a slight sway in the Arch itself.
Looking east we saw the mighty Mississippi. Not quite so mighty as it is in Memphis, which is downstream of the confluence with the Ohio River, but enormous nonetheless. On the river, huge barges carried freight cars with unknown cargo south toward New Orleans. Just below, an helicopter sat on an helipad barge waiting for an emergency call. Directly across the water, on the east bank, enormous silos with their own docks waited to load barges with grain collected from across the mid-west.
It was still pouring when we left the Arch, and the rain continued on even during dinner. But leaving the restaurant, heading back to the hotel, the setting sun to the west, refracted through raindrops over the river, created one of nature’s own ephemeral monuments. A poignant reminder that forty-five, or even one hundred and forty-five years are but a moment in the deep span of geologic time.
