Earths Inner Secrets

For the last three months, we have been studying rocks, minerals, and the Earth’s structure.  Throughout this unit, we have learned many different things.  It seemed like three units in one.  Before our unit, I thought that minerals were just rocks.   Except for diamonds and gold, I believed rocks were easy to find and worthless to humans.  Pretty rocks were used for jewelry and others for roads and landscaping.   One the major things I learned in this unit is the difference between rocks and minerals.  Minerals are natural occurring, solid, crystalline structures, formed by inorganic processes, with a definite chemical composition.  Rocks have some but not all of these features.  For example, a rock might be solid and inorganic but does not have a crystalline structure.   

Another thing we learned in this unit that I found interesting was about the inner Earth. I thought there were thousands of different layers in the Earth.  When we drew this like our teacher asked at the beginning of the unit, my inner Earth looked like a rainbow of soil layers.    After watching a Bill Nye video about the Earth’s structure, I found out that there are only 4 main layers – crust, mantle, outer core, and inner core.    The deeper in the Earth you go the hotter the temperature.

 Volcanoes were another big topic that we learned about in this unit.  We learned what volcanoes are, the different types, how they are formed, what can come out, and so much more.   At my old school, we went on an overnight field trip to visit a volcano but at the time, I had no idea what it really was and why we went there.   The only thing I really remember learning is that volcanoes smell like sulfur.  In this unit, we learned much more than I can explain here from mining to tectonic plates.

In this unit, we did several fun labs like growing a crystal garden.  Another fun lab we got to do was researching the ocean’s minerals and how they are mined.  We need to be more careful with our environment since we are polluting our oceans and lands.  In conclusion, this was a very interesting unit.  I learned much more that I through I would.  If I had to change something about this unit, I would have had fewer blog posts.