Plate Tectonics - The Crust - Weekly Blog 09/28 - 10/04

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Summary: 

Viscosity is the amount of thickness in a liquid. If you put a marble a bottle of oil, you can see that it sinks slowly to the bottom of the bottle. This is because that oil has a lot of viscosity. If you put something in a liquid with a lot of viscosity, it usually is slow in sinking. If you put a marble in a bottle of water, you can see that the marble sinks towards the bottom of the bottle faster than the one in the bottle of oil. This is because water has no viscosity. Viscosity also affects the shape of a volcano. Have you heard of shield volcanoes? They kind of look like this: 

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More of a flat volcano and not

really a pointy volcano. This is because 

of viscosity. If the magma has low silica and high temperatures, it should be runny lava, which has little viscosity, which forms a shield volcano.

SP2: Developing and Using Models:

    This week, I continued to build my volcano, and make it erupt. Me and my table had 3 bottles of sugar and 3 magma cups. We uncapped one bottle of sugar and put it in the volcano hole. Next, we put a cup of magma into the sugar, and then we stirred it with a popsicle stick. We saw that magma batch #1 was the fastest magma batch to flow down the volcano, meaning that it had little viscosity, and magma batch #2 was the slowest magma batch to run across the magma, which meant that it had a lot of viscosity.

    Another model that I did was the Snack Plate Tectonics Activity. This activity simulated plate-interaction activity. First part I did was putting a thick amount of frosting on wax paper. The frost represented the asthenosphere Then, I put two squares of fruit roll-ups that represented the oceanic plates right next to each other on the frosting. Next, I spread them apart slowly, and slightly pushing them down on the frosting. In between the fruit roll-ups, some of the frosting was exposed and rising. I think this formed a volcano at the process. Another part I did was put a fruit-rollup square and a graham cracker which represented the continental plate right next each other. Then I made them overlap. This was a subduction. Next, I dipped two edges of two graham crackers and I faced the wet edges toward each other on the frosting. I pushed them together, and the crackers started forming a mountain. At the end of this activity, I got to eat all of the remaining snacks used in this activity