Plate Tectonics - Weekly Blog 09/21 - 09/27

Image: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b4/Plate_tectonics_map.gif

Summary:

Alfred Wegener found that Africa and South America have some of the same fossils and plants. He wondered why. When he was making a map, he noticed that South America and Africa kind of fit like a puzzle. This event led him to discover a huge and massive land: Pangea. Pangea meant "all the land". Pangea was the massive land that eventually split up into seven continents. When Wegener shared his work, no one believed him, so his research went to the trash. 20 years after Wegener died, a man named Hesse discovered that the sea floor spreads and the continents move. When he shared this idea, people believed him and found out that Wegener had the same discovery. Hesse had discovered a part of the earth: Plate Tectonics. Plates are different pieces of the crust or lithosphere. It can spread apart, hit each other, and slip past each other. Plates push together, and when they slip, it causes an earthquake. This is called a strike-slip fault.

SP2: Develop and using models

I constructed physical, mental or conceptual models to represent and understand phenomena when I did an activity that showed the earth's layer's development and how long does one thing take to completely develop (actually, parts of the earth are never completely developed). Another activity done this week was how earth quakes work. Me and my table had two wooden bricks with layered clay stacked on top each other on top of the wooden bricks. Below the wooden bricks, there was a magnet so the wooden bricks wouldn't separate far. Then, we placed toothpicks across the clay. The toothpicks resembled a fence. When we moved the two bricks, I saw that the fence kind of moved past each other as if someone had moved them.