♥ Wednesday, January 21, 2009 ♥
Today Mr Heah didn't come to class. So we watched a video about the Earth's Atmosphere. It was pretty interesting. It was about this traveller who went around the world.
Let's clear this up. I will refer to this traveller/host of the show as he throughout this post. Not in any order, I will try and describe the entire show to everyone.
He travelled to Siberia where he found trapped methane underneath the ice. He and another lady dug through the snow to the ice surface of a lake I think, and they found many air bubbles trapped in the ice. To test whether the gas in the bubbles were methane, they set fire and see if it would burn. It was quite a sight. Fire on ice. Methane is more potent than Carbon Dioxide. If the ice melts in Siberia and these large amounts of methane in the permafrost gets released into the atmosphere, it would be a disaster.
He also took a fighter jet and flew into the atmosphere. When we see shooting stars, it is actually a meteors burning up in the mesosphere. The mesosphere protects us from all meteors that comes crashing into Earth. The stratosphere is the layer where it absorbs most harmful rays from the sun protecting us. And there was this guy who took an air balloon up into the sky and went even higher than he did. And when that air balloon guy reached a certain level, he jumped out and experienced free fall for a few seconds.
Next there we saw this huge cloud and there was this man who sky dived during free falling. Pretty interesting. Shows us that we can "surf" in the sky as he called it. Instead of falling straight to the ground, he can maneuver the board that was attached to his feet to move horizontally.
Then there was a theory about how the earth atmosphere was formed. It started of with countless of eruptions from volcanoes spewing out carbon dioxide and methane. Then came an organism that started to photosynthesis giving our atmosphere oxygen. As the amount of oxygen increased, the more and more organisms come alive.
There were also many others about the sahara desert blowing sand which contains many minerals to the Amazon rainforest (I think). And there was a one on the lightning at a high mountain range, Andes. It was showing how lightning looks like at different layers of the atmosphere. There was another about the rust forming under the ocean as oxygen got produced and reacted with the iron under water. After many years, the ocean dried up and left behind rocks with bending where we can see the different layers. We also saw how our atmosphere got shaped over time by the wind and sand providing amazing natural landscapes (Arizona).
All in all, today's lesson was fun and enriching. The video was informative and showed us a lot of the world and the earth's atmosphere that we don't know.
A reminder to the class: Do up your mindmap before the next lesson because Mr. Heah will go through it then :)
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there's one more part in the video that i thought was quite cool. I don't remember where he went in the video but it looks like the grand canyon. According to the video, it was formed as small grains are blown across by the wind and this friction between the slab of rock and grains causes those lines to form, creating this geographical art piece.
I also think that the fact that the guy can surf in the air and not fall is very interesting too!
(FYI the blogmaster is now alissa cause she doesnt mind and i think i will just die if i have to do a summary of the entire module at the end. heh. and the duty roster is by register number!)
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I think the video we watched is quite enriching. I am most impressed by the effects of CO2 and methane-its abundant storage under the ice (200 times more disastrous than CO2 ?!), if their percentage in the air raise due to our earth getting hotter each year, we will most probably be "cooked" in the atmosphere in the future. It has raised my awareness about global warming significantly. For sustainable development, cutting off the amount of CO2 produced by our industries is really important now.
Then, I was amazed by the information that the bacteria living on the rock (I forgot the name already) could convert toxic methane to oxygen that later on, leads to the blossom of organisms on the Earth. It's quite hard to believe that some small organisms can lead to the presence of our human beings today. Everything on Earth seems to have certain connection to each other.
I really hope to have more informative videos like this to watch in our lessons, we can still study geography while enjoying these videos.
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