woodchurch science

take the tours - two to choose from. also visit the infobank and learn how distillation and cracking work.

the discovery channel charts the rise of the oil industry. here’s a (very brief) excerpt:

the united states has about 5 percent of the world’s population, but the 21 million barrels of crude oil that it consumes each day amounts to nearly a quarter of the world’s usage.
numbers, however, don’t convey the full magnitude of america’s dependence upon oil.

an accessible account of the story of crude oil. make it into a timeline.

in this radio program howard stableford discovers how jurassic plankton ends up in our petrol tanks, why oil dominates world politics and what we might do when it starts to run out. its worth getting pupils to listen to the first 10 minutes or so of the program (including the bit about using a mars bar to illustrate the formation of sedimentary basins!), then get them to, for example, produce a timeline or cartoon strip to illustrate how plankton is converted to oil.

here’s a drag and drop activity to try when your revising the rock cycle. it’s all against the clock so try and beat my best time of 25 seconds…

rock cycle - a cycle that describes how the three rock types change from one to another over millions of years.
sandstone - a type of sedimentary rock made up of grains of sand cemented together.
sedimentary rocks - a type of rock made up from layers of sediment that have built up over millions of years and become cemented together.
volcano - mountain or hill from which lava erupts out of the Earth’s crust.
limestone - a type of sedimentary rock formed from the shells and bones of sea creatures, which contains calcium carbonate.
magma - molten rock found deep below the surface of the Earth.
metamorphic rock - rock formed when sedimentary or igneous rocks are changed by intense heat and/or pressure.
lava - molten rock from deep below the surface of the Earth that reaches the surface through cracks or volcanoes.
marble - a type of metamorphic rock that is produced whenlimestone is heated under high pressure.
igneous rock - rock that is formed from molten lava or magma that has cooled and solidified.
basalt - a type of igneous rock with small crystals.
shale - a type of sedimentary rock made up of very fine grains.
granite - a type of igneous rock with big crystals.
cementation - in the gaps between compacted grains in sedimentary layers, chemicals in the water crystallise and ‘glue’ the grains together
slate - a type of metamorphic rock that has a layered structure.
intrusive - igneous rock with large crystals, formed when magma cools slowly underground, such as granite.
compaction - grains in sedimentary layers pressed tightly together by the enormous weight of layers of sediment deposited later.
extrusive - igneous rock with small crystals, formed when lava cools quickly on the surface of the earth, such as basalt.
crystalline - a substance that contains crystals is crystalline.
density - how heavy a material is for its size (density = mass/volume).

click on these images to view the earth from a new perspective
picture 3 shows what the planet would look like with no water - weird!

with the sad news that another earthquake has left thousands dead and hundreds homeless here’s an animated guide to how these earthquakes cause such devastation. there’s also a printable version here

all the links are available in this document

wegener and continental drift, convection currents, plate boundaries, seafloor spreading,magnetic reversal patterns 1, magnetic reversal patterns 2