So basically, we are destroying all the matter cycles. Whoops, skipped too far ahead of myself, let me explain what we are actually discussing here today on My Dog Ate My Blog! Recently in Scimatics class, we have been learning about the matter cycles. There are tons of different matter cycles out there, but today, for this post we will be focusing on four. The Hydrologic, The Carbon, The Nitrogen, and The Phosphorus cycles.

THE PROJECT

With these cycles, we were paired up into partners and we chose one to research. Emerson and I started researching the Hydrologic (or just water) cycle. Most people understand how the water cycle works since you learn it in like grade 3 but here is a quick recap video!

So this cycle works great right!? Creating fresh drinking water for us, making our fruits and veggies good and happy with it’s condensation, evaporation, precipitation. All that good stuff! But, the problem is, is this cycle is slowly deteriorating as are the others I mentioned before and it’s all our fault!! I know scary stuff right?? Most people know about pollution and all of the garbage islands out there in the oceans, the lakes, and the rivers and yes that is a problem but as Emerson and I discovered, there are many others. If you want to read more about pollution and how we can help that, check out my classmate’s blogs, Kyle and Luciano.

  • Deforestation impacts a part of the water cycle called transpiration. Transpiration provides ten percent of the moisture in our air.
    Deforestation impacts a part of the water cycle called transpiration. Transpiration provides ten percent of the moisture in our air.

Those are a few other examples of major issues with the water cycle, though there is one more I would like to address. Groundwater depletion. This is the topic Emerson and I researched and did a presentation on. Here is the video of our presentation.

 

I learned so much from this project! I didn’t even know what matter cycles were before! Here is a mind map to show that. The white is what I wrote at the beginning of the unit and the green is at the end.

After this presentation, we were evaluated on a rubric. We realized there was a part of our presentation missing. We didn’t really talk much about how the pipeline would affect cycles such as the carbon cycle. So, I went home and did a little extra research. Here are the notes I took:

 

I thought that was pretty crazy. I am very glad Emerson and I had the chance to add that extra little bit to our presentation afterwards because statistics always make a presentation even better. That will be something I remember for future reference.

REFLECTION

The Biggest Lesson I learned from this Curricular competency is when it came to building our solution. Building a pipeline takes a lot of Carbon which really negatively effects the Carbon Cycle, a big factor of Global warming. Cause and effect is never really something I understood the concept of but the idea that the solution to one impact on the water cycle could negatively impact another really made it clear
As a collaborative team, Emerson and I did have some trouble deciding on an approach to Groundwater Depletion that would be completely positive for ourselves, others, the community and the world. But I mean, no choice would have been perfect. I think Emerson and I made a serious approach to solve the problem which I am really proud of. I think I have grown a lot in this competency, if the task at hand seemed like something that wasn’t possible, something that wasn’t important, I wouldn’t try to make a super serious approach.
For our project we had two very obvious hypotheses that we knew the outcome for. We started with a project on deforestation where we knew that we wanted to decrease the impact that deforestation had on transpiration. Our second hypotheses was to create a water line that carries water from here to places in California.
I learned that this is more important than you would think to evaluate the validity and limitations. It’s easy enough to build a model and plan it out perfectly but realistically, it probably isn’t possible. During our presentation we talked about the fact that this pipe is going into America which isn’t something we wouldn’t be able to control. Things like the pump that would move the water, cost, and material are limitations of the model that we recognized and that I think really shows the thought that went into our model and plan for this system. I think it is still something that I can improve on though, I could have done a bit more research on the limitations but it is something I will remember for the future