Our+Earth+Reinforcing+Activity


 * Our Earth**

__**Objective:**__ Students will be able to explain how human's impact the earth through the use of articles and pictures.

__**Materials**__
 * Book, //Our Earth//
 * Articles and Pictures about how humans impact the earth

__**Procedures**__ First, the teacher should read the book aloud to the students. This book describes a large array of physical features ranging from volcanoes to coral reefs. The book opens and closes with the idea that both the narrator and the reader spend their lives on this planet. The teacher can to relate this idea to the reality that humans are impacting the earth in positive and negative ways.Have students think-pair-share with a partner about ways that humans impact the environment. The students could also fill out a cluster web graphic organizer to help the students better understand their thinking. Bring the class back together and create a class list of student’s ideas. Remind students that humans impact the environment in both positive and negative ways.

Break the class up into groups of 3-5 and give each group an article/picture. Each article/picture describes a different way that humans are impacting the environment. Each group should read the article/view the picture and discuss them in their groups. They will either decide the main points of the article or what is occurring in the picture and be prepared to share with the rest of the class.

Once all of the groups have shared their particular environmental issue, have the class discuss the consequences of our actions and how that will affect us and our planet. End the activity by relating the discussion back to the book. The last two lines read “Our big, round earth is very beautiful. It is my home and yours.” Impress upon students that the impact of human influence on the geography of the earth is creating positive and negative consequences that they will deal with during their lives.

__**Other Ohio Standards:**__ Grade 1 Government, Civic Participation and Skills 8. Individuals are accountable for their actions

__**Possible Sample Articles and Pictures**__ Note: These articles may need to be edited/changed by the teacher based on the reading level of the students. Instead of articles a teacher could give a group a picture (ex. melting glaciers) and have them brainstorm the environmental impact of what is occurring in the image. Samples articles were retrieved from: []

__Hazy with a Chance of Sunshine__ __March 14, 2007__

We hear a lot these days about how air pollution is changing temperatures on Earth. New evidence from a mountaintop in China now suggests that pollution can also change the amount of rain and snow that fall in some places. Usually, more precipitation falls in mountainous places than in flat areas upwind from the mountains. That's because air can hold a lot of water. When wind blows wet air up a mountainside, the air gets colder. This temperature change often forces water to fall out of the air as rain or snow. In recent years, however, many mountainous areas in the western United States have been getting 25 percent less precipitation than normal. Mountains that are downwind of cities have experienced the biggest drops.

Some scientists have theorized that pollution drifts from the cities into the mountains, affecting rainfall. But proving this link has been difficult. In the quest for answers, a team led by a scientist from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem turned to a mountain in China called Mount Hua. The mountain is 2,060 meters (6,760 feet) tall and lies about 120 kilometers (75 miles) east of the Chinese city of Xi'an. Since 1954, meteorologists have been collecting details about rainfall, humidity, and visibility in the area.

Using these data, the scientists compared rainfall on Mount Hua with rainfall in the nearest city, Huayin, on days with varying levels of visibility. When the air was clear and people could see as far as 20 km (12.4 miles) away, the scientists found that 65 percent more rain fell on the mountain than in the city.

But when the air was smoggy, allowing only 8 km (5 miles) of visibility through the haze, the mountain received just 20 percent more rain than the city did. The new data support the theory that pollution stifles rainfall.

Some scientists believe that there are other explanations for the numbers. It's possible, for example, that naturally occurring particles in the air, rather than particles produced by pollution, are affecting visibility.

This is the first study to look at the connection between rainfall and changes in visibility due to air pollution. Future studies are needed to verify the link.—//E. Sohn//

__Island Extinctions__ __Jan. 24, 2007__

People arrived in Australia about 50,000 years ago. Soon after, many of the island's large mammals disappeared, new evidence suggests. Among the animals that went extinct were several species of kangaroos and wombats and some other creatures found nowhere else. Known as marsupials, these animals had pouches but filled ecological niches populated elsewhere by lions, hyenas, hippos, tapirs, and other large animals.

This illuminating new look into the past comes from a group of caves in southeastern Australia. Fossils fill the caves, which lie 300 kilometers (186 miles) southeast of Adelaide.

Researchers led by a paleontologist at the Western Australian Museum in Perth collected, identified, and dated fossils that covered some 500,000 years of history. The bones that they found belonged to 62 species of mammals that didn't fly. Most of these creatures fell into the caves through sinkholes in the ground. Owls brought in others.

Previously, scientists had used icicle-like rock formations, called stalactites, to piece together a history of climate change in the area. When the weather was wet, water dripped down the stalactites, making them grow. During dry times, stalactite growth stopped.

Over the past 500,000 years, the Perth scientists found, the number and types of mammals in the caves decreased only during long dry spells. The animals came back when the rains returned.

Between 50,000 and 45,000 years ago, however, many of Australia's creatures that were cat-sized or larger disappeared, even though there was no major climate shift. The next ice age wouldn't begin for another 25,000 years.

"The climate was stable then, and mammals really shouldn't have been going extinct," says Richard G. Roberts, a geochemist at the University of Wollongong in Australia.

"The only thing that's new during that period," he adds, "is people."

Scientists aren't yet sure how people might have caused the wave of extinction among large animals in Australia. People often burned much of the landscape, and some experts argue that animals died as fire destroyed their habitats. It's also possible that large species dwindled gradually as people hunted and ate them faster than they could reproduce.

Whatever the explanation, the data are clear. People had a more profound effect on the lives (and deaths) of Australian animals than climate change did.—//E. Sohn//

__Power of the Wind__ __Emily Sohn__ __March 9, 2005__

On a breezy day, you can feel the wind in your hair, on your face, against your body. It tickles, pushes, or slams into you, depending on how hard it's blowing. When it's windy, you can fly a kite or go sailing.

Wind is also an increasingly valuable source of energy—helping to bring electricity into our lives. Without electricity, there'd be no TV, no video games, and no cell phones. We'd have to sit around fires for warmth and eat dinner by candlelight.

At the National Wind Technology Center (NWTC) in Golden, Colorado, scientists are working to improve wind-power technology and lower the cost of generating electricity. The center is part of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, where researchers look for Earth-friendly ways to power our lives.

A renewable natural resource is one that can't be used up or one that can be replaced naturally. Sunlight is an example of a renewable resource that's always available somewhere, and wood is an example of one that can be replaced by new growth. Wind is also a renewable resource.

Wind is the fastest growing source of electricity in the world. It's often one of the least expensive forms of renewable power available. And it can sometimes be the cheapest form of any kind of power, some experts say.

Generating power from the wind leaves no dangerous waste products behind, says NWTC's Jim Johnson. Best of all, its supply is unlimited.

"It sounds almost trite to say, but it's true," Johnson says. "The wind is always blowing somewhere."

The idea behind wind power is simple. Like pinwheels, windmills are designed to catch breezes, which cause their blades to spin. This motion represents energy, which can then be used or converted into other forms of energy.

The potential for wind power is huge, advocates say. Right now, the United States gets less than one-tenth of a percent of its electricity from wind energy, Johnson says. Some experts say it's possible to boost that number to 20 percent—or more. The U.S. Department of Energy estimates that the world's winds could generate 15 times the amount of energy now used around the globe, if only we could tap into them.

Even so, wind energy has its critics, who argue that the system is far from perfect. One of the biggest problems with wind, they say, is its unreliability. Though the wind might always be blowing somewhere at any given time, there's no guarantee that it would blow all the time at any given place.

__The Down Side of Keeping Clean__ __April 2, 2003__

Wash your hands. Brush your teeth. Scrub the toilet. Do the dishes. Being clean is supposed to keep us healthy by destroying bacteria that make us sick. But our meticulous attention to cleanliness might have a down side. New research suggests that the chemicals we use to clean and disinfect could be damaging the environment by killing off algae at the base of the food chain. Over the past decade, the war against bacteria has been escalating. From dish soap to toothpaste, cleaning products have become increasingly deadly to the tiny troublemakers. After getting dumped down the drain, those household chemicals usually go straight through the sewer system and into lakes and streams, ignored by wastewater treatment plants.

Curious about the environmental effects of all that chemical runoff, environmental scientist Brittan A. Wilson of the University of Kansas in Lawrence and colleagues collected algae from a Kansas stream. In the lab, the scientists doused the algae with three common household chemicals in concentrations comparable to levels often found in American streams.

The number of species of algae and overall growth of algae dropped in samples treated with the chemicals, but not in untreated samples, the researchers report. Those results may be alarming, but they shouldn't be a complete surprise. "It's stupid to think that chemicals that keep toothpaste safe from bacteria won't have an effect at the other end of the sewer pipe," says ecologist Stanley I. Dodson of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. What is surprising is that even low concentrations of the chemicals can have a big effect.—//E. Sohn//

__A Grim Future for Some Killer Whales__ __April 15, 2009__ In 1989, an oil tanker called the //Exxon Valdez// struck an underwater reef in Prince William Sound, a large body of water in southern Alaska. The ship dumped about 11 million gallons of crude oil into the freezing water, creating the largest spill in U.S. history — and a disaster for animals that lived in or near the water. Now, 20 years later, the area still has not fully recovered. At the time of the spill, two groups of orcas, or killer whales, were swimming in the area. One of these groups of whales appears to be headed for extinction, and the other is recovering more slowly than scientists had predicted.

The first group, called AT-1, wasn’t large to begin with: When the spill happened, the group had 22 whales. Nine of these whales died during the spill, and since then, no baby whales have been born in the group. The older males — who can live to be 60 — have been dying off. Now, only seven whales remain.

These orcas may look like and live in the same areas as other killer whales, but orcas in the AT-1 group are genetically different and communicate with a different set of sounds. They are transient orcas, which have larger home ranges than the other kind of killer whales, called resident orcas. Transient orcas eat mammals, such as harbor seals, sea lions, porpoises and other whales; resident orcas eat fish. These two types of killer whales don’t breed with each other. Lingering effects from the oil spill are not the only threats to orcas. The whales are swimming in polluted waters, and scientists have found these pollutants in the whales’ blubber (or fat). These toxic substances may keep the whales from reproducing successfully. The pollution probably originated in plumes of air that wafted across the Pacific from China and Southeast Asia, says Craig Matkin, a marine mammal biologist who studies the whales.

“I don’t want to make it sound like the oil spill is solely responsible for [this group of whales’] decline,” Matkin says. “It just exacerbated an already bad situation.” The other group of endangered whales eats fish and squid. These are resident killer whales, and their group is called AB. After the spill, 13 whales in this group died. Scientists predicted the population would recover — that is, return to its original size — within 12 years. But they were wrong. The whales that died were mostly females and juveniles. Now, 20 years later, scientists think the AB group of whales will not recover for another 10 years.

The oil spill also broke up the family structure of the whales. Groups of orcas live in matriarchal communities, where a female acts as the head of the family. The matriarch of the AB group apparently died in the oil spill, and afterward many whales left to join a different group.

When the AB group does eventually recover, it won’t be the same. And the AT-1 group may become extinct. Other scientists are finding that certain other major species affected by the oil-spill — like otters, clams, herring and certain birds — have also failed to fully recover. And in many cases, they’re surprised about why, 20 years after the spill, so many effects of the //Exxon Valdez// disaster still persist.

__Hot Summers, Wild Fires__ __July 26, 2006__

A wood fire can be handy when you're camping. You can roast marshmallows or stay warm, for example. Forest fires that rage out of control, however, are a big problem.

Wildfires cause hundreds of millions of dollars in damage every year. And the amount of destruction has grown over the last 2 decades, especially in the western United States. To understand better why the northern Rocky Mountains region has been hit especially hard by wildfires, scientists from the University of Arizona in Tucson looked at weather, snow, and fire records from 1970 to 2003.

Their study showed that, between 1987 and 2003, fires burned an area 6.5 times larger than the area burned between 1970 and 1986. The fire season also started earlier, and its average length increased by 78 days.

Warmer spring and summer temperatures appear to be part of the explanation for this change. The average temperature in the study's more recent period was 0.87°C higher than it was in the earlier period. And this trend is likely to continue. Experts predict that average summer temperatures may rise between 2°C and 5°C by the year 2050 in western North America.

The timing of snowmelt appears to be another cause of the fire boom. When snow melts early in the season, forests become drier through the summer and catch fire and burn more easily. Western snow packs now typically melt a week to a month earlier than they did 50 years ago, according to recent studies. Some people have blamed the growing fire risk on policies that allow brush and branches to build up on forest floors. But clearing brush by itself won't help much if changes in climate are largely responsible for increasingly severe forest fires.—//E. Sohn//

// smoggy city// // wind power// // melting glacier// //water dam// // oil spill// //deforestation// //canal//