Relative Dating

Monday was Labor Day so we did not have school.


 On Tuesday in science class we began reviewing for our quiz on Wednesday. We went over some new rock terms used in relative dating. Relative dating is when you classify rocks with no certain number but in chronological order like youngest to oldest. Also in addition to that, we did a worksheet focusing mainly on relative dating and on the back we added some new rock terms. The pictures we drew with the terms really helped me understand the main concepts and helped me study for my quiz the next day.


On Wednesday we had our quiz. I think I did okay but in my opinion some of the rock questions were worded weird. I studied for about an hour but one thing I could improve on is double checking the notes to get any information I might have missed. Along with the science quiz we had another science Olympiad meeting. I am super pumped for this year and am glad to be a part of the whole thing.


On Thursday we reviewed our quiz we took the day before. I did not do as well as I hoped but there is always room for improvement. Since we had a substitute we finished the note cards for unit two. Most of the note cards we added were words I was familiar with but had no idea what they meant. Before doing these note cards I had no idea that Pangaea was when the earth was one large supercontinent(also a vocab word) that began to break apart with a process called uniformitarianism . I now know from the quiz that Hutton came up with the term uniformitarianism not unconformity.


On Friday we reviewed our notes cards we did the previous day in class. After that we started section 5 of our notes. One thing I took back from the notes is the science words used by  professionals. I bet you didn't know that ga stands for giga annum which is a billion years. So instead of saying the earth is 4.6 billion years old you could say the earth is 4.6(ga) years old. One of the Latin roots you probably didn't know, unless you took Latin, is eon which means big. In science words an eon is the biggest division in the geologic time scale.

Overall this week has been a week of review and notes. Next week will be much shorter so we will not be blogging.One thing I can take back from this week is even if you do not do so well on an assignment you can always take something back from it.

Relative dating Lab

Relative dating graph

Fossils and Dating

On Monday we started the week by making three new note cards and starting the new vocab for unit 2. After that we reviewed the test we took on Friday. This test was only a review so future tests should be much harder because it is new material. We still had an Oreo lab to finish so we drew up our conclusions and proved our hypothesis to be wrong or right. Tomorrow we will start a new lab to learn new topics.

On Tuesday we did and intro into unit 2. The whole creation of the earth in one class period is a lot considering it was 13 billion years ago. We first started by adding 3 more cards that would help us understand some of the topics in the unit. After that we began to take notes and fill out an earth's crust diagram that looked like a pizza that was in the oven too long. We briefly talked about the first two layers which were the inner and outer layers of the earth's crust. After this lesson I happened to realize that we as humans have not been around for along time.

On Wednesday we continued with our notes and learning about the creation of the earth. We completed two more note cards to add to unit two of our vocab.Then we finished our diagram of the earth's layers. We are exposed to the earth's crust, the top layer, so we are naturally thinking it is one of the biggest layers but it really is not. The mantel is the largest and thickest layer making 70% of the the earth's volume. Even though there is so many movies about going to the center of the earth it is pretty much not likely that anyone has gone down there. First of all the inner core is 6000 kilometers down and approximately 12000 degrees Fahrenheit. Yeah, I don't think it is very possible. One of my favorite parts of the unit is learning about fossils. Fossils are made out of traces of past life that are preserved in rock in a process that can take hundreds of years.

On Thursday we continued with our notes on Unit two. This time we went deeper into fossils. After that we started a new lab on radiometric dating. Unlike relative dating, radiometric dating gives a more accurate age on fossils. When a rock sample has a radioactive element, it can be dated by how much of the parent isotope remains. In this lab we simulated the process radio metric dating with pennies. We had a hundred pennies and each penny represented an atom of the element carbon 14. We would then dump out all the pennies and the dump would be considered a half-life. We removed all the coins with tails to represent removing the dead atoms that are no longer radioactive. We then recorded the number of heads which were the parent isotopes. We continued this process several times until there was no more. We did three trials and all of our data was very close. In reality each half-life would take 5730 years and "ain't no body got time for that!". This lab was a good simulation in my opinion and helped me grasp the larger topic of radiometric dating.

On Friday we reviewed our notes for unit 2. One of the main things I took back from the unit was Superposition because it is such a fun word. Superposition states that sedimentary rock formations form so that the oldest layer is on the bottom and the youngest layer is on the top. This makes sense because over time more rock layer will be added. After reviewing notes we worked on our radiometric dating lab. We reviewed the data and determined how many years it would take for each half-life. One thing I can improve on this week is to double check my labs for spelling and small careless errors.