WHAT DO YOU KNOW?Name ______________________________ Hour _________ Due Date __________ Score _______ / _______

1. t or f The estimated age of the earth is 4.6 billion years.

_________________________________________________________________

2. t or f The earths surface is 50% land and 50% water.

_________________________________________________________________

3. t or f The earth is orbiting the sun at about 65 miles per hour.

_________________________________________________________________

4. t or f The Atlantic Ocean is the largest on the earth.

_________________________________________________________________

5. t or f The longest river on earth is the Amazon.

_________________________________________________________________

6. t or f The highest mountain on earth is Mt. Kilimanjaro in Africa.

_________________________________________________________________

7. t or f The hottest place on earth is Death Valley in California.

_________________________________________________________________

8. t or f The coldest place on earth is Reykjavik in Iceland.

_________________________________________________________________

9. t or f The Arabian desert in Asia is the largest in the world.

_________________________________________________________________

10. t or f The lowest point on earth is Lake Assal in Africa._________________________________________________________________

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HOW OLD IS EARTH, HOW WAS IT FORMED?Name ______________________________ Hour _________ Due Date __________ Score _______ / _______

Aristotle was pretty smart, but he didn’t know it all. One of his mistakes was the notion that the world always existed. But he shouldn’t feel bad: he wasn’t alone. Plenty of other people have just assumed that Earth always was. Yet almost every culture has produced Creation myths to explain the beginning of the world. And until very recently in human history, faith outweighed science in reaching those explanations. Perhaps the most notorious attempt to reconcile the biblical version of Creation with known facts was the timetable worked out by Archbishop James Ussher in 1650. In Ussher’s chronology of the world, Creation took place at 9 a.m. on October 26, 40043 B.C. Included in the margins of the King James Version of the Bible for centuries to come, Ussher’s version of events was accepted as Gospel, literally. Even in modern America, the fighting isn’t over. During the 1980’s, in several American states, groups of fundamentalist Christians went to the courts in attempting to require state schools to teach “creationism theory,” a pseudo science grounded in the biblical version of Creation, alongside Darwin’s evolutionary theory in biology textbooks. These “creationists” even had a powerful ally in President Reagan, whose scientific views must be taken into account. After all, this is the man who once said on the campaign trail that trees were a major cause of Pollution.

Of course, religion held sway for most of history. Science entered the picture very slowly but quickly gathered steam. In 1779m the French naturalist Georges Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, made the remarkable astute guess that the Earth started out hot and was slowly cooling. Believing that the Earth was made primarily of iron, he heated iron balls and then measured the rate at which they cooled to come up the an Earth age of seventy-five thousand years. Don't’ laugh. Comte de Buffon was no buffoon. If wide of the mark in his calculations, he was at least making an attempt to bring scientific methods to the question. He was simply short on good information. Long after be Buffon, other scientists tried similar experiments with different materials.

But with the discovery of radiation early in this century, science got one of its periodic major shakeups. The previously unknown high heat produced by radioactivity made attempts at measuring cooling metals obsolete by simple thermometer readings. Radioactivity produces temperatures that were off the charts. In time, radioactive dating was discovered, giving science a much clearer notion of the Earth’s age.

The oldest rocks dated by science so far are about 4 billion years old. Well that’s actually 3.96 billion if you want to be picky about it. Found among younger rocks in Canada, this ancient stone-which appears to have gathered no moss-is actually a grain of zircon (a brown to colorless mineral, zircon can be heated, cut, and polished to form a brilliant blue-white gem). In Greenland, rock formations have been dated at 3.8 billion years. Obviously the Earth has to be older that that and the best estimate is 4.6 billion years old. That number, by the way looks like this: 4,600,000,000. (This is the American usage of billion, meaning a thousand million; in British usage, billion means the much larger number of one million million, or 1,000,000,000,000.)

Billion, trillion, zillion - it all seems pretty much the same. In these days of trillion dollar deficit budgets being casually discussed in Washington D.C., people often forget how enormous these numbers actually are. When you see the words million, or ten million ot ten billion, they blur into a simplistic mind picture of Big Number. We have difficulty comprehending the difference between such mind-boggling numbers.

Given the 4.6-billion-year date, modern science assumes the Earth was formed at about the same time as the sun. The best guess, theoretically speaking, is that when the sun condensed out of a cloud of interstellar gas, a small amount of material was left spinning outside its main body, like clothes in a washing machine. The pull of gravity brought together materials in what are called planetesimals- chunks of rock and frozen liquids ranging in size from a few feet to a few miles across. As these whirling bodies collided, some of them merged in a process called accretion. Like all the specs of dust that collect into dust balls under your bed, these planetesimals began to come together to form the earth and other planets. As they gradually grew larger through accretion, these emerging planets exerted a stronger gravitational pull, gathering in other smaller planetesimals. But some planetesimals went spinning off on their own, colliding with each other and creating a galactic mess of cookie crumbs that are now called meteorites.

Rocks brought back from the moon by the Apollo astronauts in 1970 proved to be 3 to 4 billion years old, younger than the Earth and consequently crimping the notion that the Earth and the moon were formed at the same time. A new theory of the moon’s birth that has caught on among the science guys was originated by william Hartmann and Donald R. Davis and explained by Hartman in his book The History of the Earth. Nicknamed the “Big Splash,” Hartmann’s idea holds that the moon formed out of a collision between the 20-million-year-old Earth and another large planetesimal that hit the Earth with a glancing blow. The debris from this cosmic fender bender was ejected into an orbit around Earth and came together to form the moon, which is made of materials similar to those of earth’s. 2

HOW OLD IS EARTH, HOW WAS IT FORMED?Name ______________________________ Hour _________ Due Date __________ Score _______ / _______

1. When did Aristotle believe that the earth was formed?

2. According to James Ussher, when was the world created?

3. What was Ussher’s timetable based upon?

4. According to Georges Leclerc, how old was the earth?

5. How did Leclerc come up with this estimate?

6. How old do scientists today believe that the Earth is?

7. How is scientists number arrived at?

8. Give a short summary of how the reading explains how the earth was formed?

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THE EARTH INSIDE AND OUTName ______________________________ Hour _________ Due Date __________ Score _______ / _______

INSIDE EARTH

The earth is about 24,900 miles in circumference and about 7,900 miles in diameter. Although the earth seems like a

solid ball, it is really more like a series of shells that surround one another. The core is the center of the earth and is

made up of iron and nickel. The outer core is liquid, but the inner core is solid. Surrounding the core is the mantle,

which has several layers. The mantle contains most of the earth’s mass. Magma, which is molten rock, can form in

the mantle and rise through the crust, the thin layer of rock at the earth’s surface. Study the diagram below to learn

more about the earth’s interior.

ON AND ABOVE THE EARTH

Surrounding the earth is a layer of gases called the atmosphere. It contains the oxygen we breathe, protects the

earth from radiation and space debris, and provides the medium for weather and climate. The solid rock portion of

the earth’s surface is the lithosphere, which includes the crust and uppermost mantle. Under the ocean, the

lithosphere forms the seafloor. The huge landmasses above water are called continents. There are seven

continents: North America, South America, Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia, and Antarctica. The hydrosphere is made

up of the water elements on the earth, which include oceans, seas, rivers, lakes, and water in the atmosphere.

Together, the atmosphere, the lithosphere, and the hydrosphere form the biosphere, the part of the earth where

plants and animals live.

CONTINENTAL DRIFT

In 1912, Alfred Wegener of Germany presented a new idea about continents—the continental drift hypothesis. It

maintained that the earth was once a supercontinent that divided and slowly drifted apart over millions of years.

Wegener called the supercontinent Pangaea (from a Greek word meaning “all earth”). An ocean called Panthalassa

surrounded it. The supercontinent split into many plates that drifted, crashed into each other, and split apart several

times before they came to their current positions. This process occurred over millions of years. In the 1960s,

scientists studying the sea floor discovered that the youngest rocks were in the middle of the ocean, at long cracks in

the crust. This suggested that the new sea floor was being added, pushing the continents apart. Later in this

chapter, you will learn how the rocks of the earth’s surface are broken into giant plates that move and continue to

shape the earth.4

THE EARTH INSIDE AND OUTName ______________________________ Hour _________ Due Date __________ Score _______ / _______

In My Own WordsOutline five main ideas of the reading in your own words

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

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BODIES OF WATER AND LANDFORMSName ______________________________ Hour _________ Due Date __________ Score _______ / _______

OCEANS AND SEASWithout both freshwater and saltwater, life on this planet would be impossible. Water not only supports plants and animals, it helps distribute heat on the earth. The ocean is an interconnected body of salt water that covers about 71 percent of our planet. It covers a little more than 60 percent of the Northern Hemisphere and about 81 percent of the Southern Hemisphere. Even though it is one ocean, geographers divide it into four main parts: the Atlantic Ocean, the Pacific Ocean, the Indian Ocean, and the Arctic Ocean, which is sometimes considered part of the Atlantic. The largest of the oceans is the Pacific. The waters near Antarctica are sometimes called the Southern Ocean.

OCEAN MOTION The salty water of the ocean circulates through three basic motions: currents, waves, and tides. Currents act like rivers flowing through the ocean. Waves are swells or ridges produced by winds. Tides are the regular rises and falls of the ocean created by the gravitational pull of the moon or the sun. The motion of theocean helps distribute heat on the planet. Winds blow over the ocean and are either heated or cooled by the water. When the winds eventually blow over the land, they moderate the temperature of the air over the land.

HYDROLOGIC CYCLE

The hydrologic cycle is the continuos circulation of water between the atmosphere, the oceans, and the earth. As you will see in the video, water evaporates into the atmosphere from the surface of the oceans, other bodies of water, and from plants. The water exists in the atmosphere as vapor. Eventually, the vapor cools, condenses, and falls to earth as precipitation—rain or snow. The water soaks into the ground, evaporates to the atmosphere, or flows into rivers to be recycled.

1. Oceans cover _______ % of the earth’s surface. That means that land covers _______ % of the surface.

2. The largest ocean on the earth is the _______________________________ .

3. List the three basic ocean movements mentioned in the textbook.

a.

b.

c.

4. These movements help to distribute ____________________ over the planet.

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THE APPLE OF OUR EYEName ______________________________ Hour _________ Due Date __________ Score _______ / _______

This demonstration is intended to show what the earth is made up of and how much of the earth is usable. Answer the questions as we go through the demonstration. We will also have discussion questions to answer following each of the two parts.

Part one: FarmlandNote what each of the following represents

a. The whole apple: Planet Earth

b. 3/4 of the apple:

c. 1/4 of the apple:

d. 1/8 of the apple:

e. 1/8 of the apple:

f. 3/32 of the apple:

g. 1/32 of the apple:

h. peel of 1/32:

Two hundred years ago, most of America’s crop lands had at least 21 inches of topsoil, today, it is down to six inches. We lost 6 million acres of prime farmland between 1982 and 1992-an area roughly equivalent the state of Vermont. (If that eroded soil from crop lands were to be gathered annually and put on a football fields, each years pile would be about 200 miles deep.) Four of those six million acres were lost to urban and suburban expansion. ? The other 2 billion acres, or 1 billion tons of topsoil, were lost through erosion caused by deforestation, unsustainable farming practices and animal grazing. Worldwide, we lose 25 billion tons of topsoil per year.

1. How do the factors below contribute to erosion of arable land?

a. deforestation:

b. over farming:

c. overgrazing:

2. If we exhaust the food-production resources we have now, won’t science devise new ways to increase food production as it’s done in the past?

3. What conclusions can we draw about the relationship between a growing population and a shrinking amount of land capable of growing food for those people?

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Part two: WaterNote what each of the following represents

a. The whole apple: Planet Earth

b. 3/4 of the apple:

c. 1/8 of the apple:

d. 4/32 of the apple:

e. Peel of 4/32:

f. Sliver of Peel:

In the United States, over 40% of the groundwater (which serves as drinking water for over half of the population) is contaminated by industrial, agricultural, and even household pollution, waste disposal into the ground, and chemical waste from mining and petroleum production. After contamination, it is extremely difficult and costly to purify the groundwater. For example, one quart of used motor oil, poured into the sewer, can contaminate up to two million gallons of drinking water.

1. What other sources of clean freshwater are available to us?

2. As usable water becomes more scarce, what are some possible solutions to provide clean water to the 7 billion people on earth?

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LANDFORMSName ______________________________ Hour _________ Due Date __________ Score _______ / _______

Swamp Biosphere Reservoir Plateau

Canyon Lagoon Cape Continental Divide

Fault Estuary Bay Headwaters

Peninsula Ocean Currents Basin Gulf

Strait Lithosphere Archipelago Glacier

Dam Island Desert Reef

Oasis Mesa Delta Atoll

Isthmus Hydrosphere

1. _____________________________ An area of land largely enclosed by higher land.

2. _____________________________ The highest point of a continent from which the direction of river flow is determined.

3. _____________________________ A broad expanse of generally high and flat land.

4. _____________________________ A mass of land almost entirely surrounded by water.

5. _____________________________ A lake where water is collected and stored for future use.

6. _____________________________ An area of land that is always soaked with water; low, wet land that supports grass and trees

7. _____________________________ A small body of water separated from a larger body of water by a barrier of sand or coral reefs.

8. _____________________________ A body of land completely surrounded by water .

9. _____________________________ A narrow passage of water connecting two larger bodies of water.

10. _____________________________ A point of land extending into the sea that is smaller than a peninsula.

11. _____________________________ A circular coral island that encloses a lagoon.

12. _____________________________ A river of ice, moving slowly down a mountain slope or outward from its central mass.

13, _____________________________ All of the land on earth is collectively. 9

LANDFORMSName ______________________________ Hour _________ Due Date __________ Score _______ / _______

14. _____________________________ Upper river springs, streams and tributaries.

15. _____________________________ An ocean inlet that merges with the mouth of a river.

16. _____________________________ Dry, barren region usually sandy and without trees, little rainfall or practical use of land unless irrigated.

17. _____________________________ A group of islands or a body of water that has many islands in it.

18. _____________________________ All the water on earth is collectively.

19. _____________________________ A fertile place in the desert where there is water and some vegetation

20. _____________________________ A body of water that penetrates a coastline that is smaller than a gulf.

21. _____________________________ A tall, flat-topped mountain with steep vertical sides.

22. _____________________________ A narrow, low ridge of rock, or more commonly of coral, that is connected to a coast.

23. _____________________________ A fracture in the rocks along which there has been movement.

24. _____________________________ The part of earth where life is found.

25. _____________________________ A narrow strip of land, with water on both sides, connecting two larger land masses.

26. _____________________________ The triangular shaped land found at the mouth of some large rivers.

27. _____________________________ A deep, narrow depression in the earth’s surface often having a river running through it.

28. _____________________________ A part of an ocean or sea that is partially enclosed by a curving coastline.

29. _____________________________ Ocean streams that are propelled by prevailing winds and the earth’s rotation.

30. _____________________________ A natural or artificial structure which impedes the flow of a stream, causing the water to form a lake or pond.

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LANDFORM BINGOName ______________________________ Hour _________ Due Date __________ Score _______ / _______

Write the name of individual landforms in each of the blank boxes. You may have one free space. The game will be played by reading the definition and matching to the names written on the card. Different variations of the game will be played during the class hour.

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WHY IS OCEAN WATER SALTY?Name ______________________________ Hour _________ Due Date __________ Score _______ / _______

About 70% of the Earth is covered with water, and we find 97% of that water in the oceans. Everyone who has taken in a mouthful of ocean water while swimming knows that the ocean is really salty.

All water has some dissolved material in it. This dissolved material can be solids, liquids or gases that have completely mixed with the water. This dissolved material which can come from the land, precipitation, or the atmosphere, is also referred to as dissolved salts. Dissolved salts are found in river water, groundwater, rain water, lake water, drinking water and so on. Yet, these are all considered fresh water. The difference between fresh water and ocean water is that ocean water contains many more dissolved salts.

Ocean water is about 3.5% salt. That means that if the oceans dried up completely, enough salt would be left behind to build a 180-mile-tall, one- mile-thick wall around the equator. And more than 90 percent of that salt would be sodium chloride, or ordinary table salt.

The oceans sure contain a lot of salt. How did that salt come to be there? It is thought that when the Earth was still young, many of the gasses emitted from volcanoes dissolved in the primitive ocean, originally making it salty. Now, one of the main contributors of salt in the ocean is the continual rinsing of the Earth. Rivers, streams and groundwater all flow into the oceans. They carry water and dissolved minerals or salts from the rocks they have washed over. These dissolved salts then get deposited in the ocean. Another great contributor of salts to the ocean comes from the mid-ocean ridges, the areas of sea floor spreading. So, the oceans are getting saltier every day...but the rate of increase is so small we can't even measure it yet!

From the top of the ocean all the way to the depths of the ocean, salinity is between ~33-37 ppt or psu (average salinity of the ocean is 35 ppt). You can see from the image shown on this page that salinity for almost the entire ocean (at sea surface) is colored some shade of orange, corresponding to a salinity measurement around 33-36 ppt or psu. As shown on this graph, there are some geographic variations of salinity that are of interest. Salinity of the top layer of the ocean is closely linked with precipitation and evaporation. Evaporation leaves behind dissolved salts increasing salinity and precipitation "freshens" the top ocean layers. So, salinity is high in mid-latitudes where evaporation is high and precipitation is low (darker oranges). Salinity is low near the equator because precipitation is so high (lighter orange). Very high latitudes can also see decreases in salinity where sea ice melts and "freshens" the water (light orange and even yellow in the Arctic).

The oceans are naturally salty. The saline environment has quite an effect on life in the oceans. Most creatures that live in the ocean could not live in fresh water. However, when the highly saline waters of the ocean meet fresh water, an estuary is formed. This is a special environment where some creatures have learned to adapt to a mixture of fresh and salt water. When fresh water, ground water and soils are altered by human actions and salinity greatly increases, it can have an extreme detrimental effect on life there. Changes in salinity brought about by human residential, commercial and industrial activity can kill plant life, aquatic life, and animal life in a given area. Humans have the responsibility to make sure their actions are not causing this type of devastation.

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WHY IS OCEAN WATER SALTY?Name ______________________________ Hour _________ Due Date __________ Score _______ / _______

1. The article is mainly about ______

a. Informing readers about the uses of sea salt.

b. Describing how salt water can be turned into fresh water.

c. Persuading readers to use less water.

d. Informing readers about the processes that make ocean water salty.

2. What percent of the world’s water is found in oceans ______

a. 97%

b. 70%

c. 3.5%

d. 35%

3. Salinity is high in the mid-latitudes. According to the passage, why is this true? ______

a. Precipitation is high and evaporation is low.

b. More dissolved salts from rivers are deposited there.

c. Evaporation is high and precipitation is low.

d. Less aquatic live lives in the mid-latitudes

4. Which of the following statements is an opinion? ______

a. 90% of ocean salt is ordinary table salt

b. Humans should be more cautions to preserve sea life.

c. Oceans are getting saltier every day.

d. Rivers, streams and groundwater all flow into the oceans.

5. The best definition for the word salinity is ______

a. How salty water is.

b. How crazy a person is .

c. How much precipitation occurs in a month.

d. How many rivers flow into a single body of water

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USING CONTOUR MAPSName ______________________________ Hour _________ Due Date __________ Score _______ / _______

Contour Interval:

Contour line:

Contour map:

In this activity we will be using a contour map to determine elevation. A contour map has many contour lines on it. These lines show elevation. Each line on the map joins all the places that have the same elevation.

Look at the example. It shows how a contour map is made. This drawing is of an island. Look at the part of the drawing marked “top view.” This shows you how the island would look from an airplane. Look at the part of the drawing labeled “Side View.” This shows you how the island would look from a boat on the water.

Now look at the top view. Imagine yourself in a plane high above the island, looking down. Imagine that you could see where all of the lines that “cut through” the island come out. The lines would look like the top view. Each line is called a contour line, because it follows the shape, or contour, of the land. Each contour line joins points with the same elevation. Each line is numbered to show how high above sea level the points joined by that line are located. By reading the numbers on contour lines, you can tell how high each line is above sea level.

Based on what you see in the example, what does a contour map look like when there is:

a. a steep slope?

b. a gradual slope?

c. no slope?

Look at the contour map of Blue Mound State Park.

a. What is the highest point?

b. What is the contour interval for the map?

20001000

30004000 5000

30002000 5000

Top View

Side View

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MATCHING CONTOURSName ______________________________ Hour _________ Due Date __________ Score _______ / _______

Match the contour to the land form that it depicts. Match by putting the letter that matches the number in the blank on the left.

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DRAWING CONTOURSName ______________________________ Hour _________ Due Date __________ Score _______ / _______

Draw a simple contour map of each of the following fictional landforms.

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MAKING A CONTOUR MAPName ______________________________ Hour _________ Due Date __________ Score _______ / _______

As a final piece in understanding contour maps, each student will create a fictional landscape from aluminum foil and will create a simple contour map depicting their landscape. Follow the steps and pay attention to the specific requirements for the map.

1. Begin by creating a landscape from aluminum foil. Make attempts to create drastic changes in elevationthroughout the landscape.

2. Survey your landscape. Get a general idea of how elevation changes in different parts of the map. Give a simple explanation below. ( At least 3 sentences )

3. Begin your contour map by drawing in the key points. Remember that your final product should show how theland flows or changes across the landscape. Consult examples from past students to get a visual idea of what the final product will look like.

4. Continue your map by adding as much detail as possible. Your map must include at least five contour lines.You must also include a contour interval which will be completely fictional.

5. Include TODALSTitleOrientationDateAuthor Legend Scale

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