Apologia General Science, Module 6, Foundations of Geology

►Videos and Resources for this module

In this module, we learned two more new words!  Uniformitarianism and catastrophism. (!!!)
C'mon, they're no harder than all the words I learned in Biology last year!  
When thinking of the word uniformitarianism, think of uniform - same.  This is the belief that if something is happening slowly today, such as erosion, it has always happened that way.  Uniformitarianists believe that the earth's geography was formed over billions of years.
Catastrophism comes from catastrophe.  This is the belief that most of earth's geography was formed by a large-scale catastrophe -- the Flood.  There are always local floods, some volcanoes, even tsunamis that cause large-scale damage, but nothing like the Flood caused.

We studied how water and wind erosion can affect geography.  I came across this site that had 12 Weathering/Erosion Stations, and we did several of those.

Experiment 6.2, Separation of Sedimentation
We added dirt, gravel, sand, and water to a jar.  They were to shake it up several times during the evening and let it sit overnight.  They had brought their own quart jars.
You can see the fine dirt at the top, followed by the sand and dirt, then sand and gravel.  You can't really see the gravel, but it's there.  =)

I like this picture. ↓
One of my students brought this in and let me keep it from one class to the next so I could get a picture after the blue chalk had settled.
(Thanks, Grace!)
← This is actually a 2-liter that has not been "blown up"!!!
I was amazed!  =)



Experiment 6.3 was about Physical Weathering: The Power of Plants
This experiment did not work, not even after a retry.  Boo.  =(
Readers, if you got yours to work, please tell me what you did!  If you have pictures, I'd love to see them!

We did the experiment as directed, mixing the plaster of Paris, and dropping the lima beans in, and knowing it was okay if they sank a little.  We covered them with folded, moist paper towels and sat them in the sun, keeping the paper towels wet.
Well, the beans did sprout all right.  Right out of the plaster!  Just popped right up.  There was no cracking of the plaster at all.  My experiment, plus the experiments of 5 families (one per family instead of one per kid) were all fails.
← We DID have one to sprout up from the side of the plaster.  A student brought it back and I took a picture.  Very thankful I was, too, since my retry failed also.  (Thanks, Courtney!)


She said she thought that one had sunk way down in the plaster when they dropped it in.  I should have popped the plaster out of the bowl to look at the bottom, but didn't.  =\  But still, there was no splitting of the plaster.  bleh.
Sigh.  I had already tried to redo it, carefully pushing my beans way into the plaster with the seed sprout thingy pointing down.  →
No go.  Fail.  >: (  (very grumpy!)  I am not trying again.


Experiment 6.4, Chemical Weathering
For these experiments I needed limestone and steel wool.  And vinegar.  I only needed 2 pieces of steel wool and just kind of tore/broke it into thirds.  I was given some samples of limestone which JohnDavid (my son) broke apart with a hammer.  I needed it to be the size that could fit in a pint jar.  (Again, they brought their own jars - 2 each family)
← We put the limestone in and covered it with vinegar and immediately saw the bubbles.  Lime in the limestone reacts with the acid in vinegar to make carbon dioxide and other chemicals.  This was to sit overnight.
The limestone started to break down, and eventually we could see the sediment.

The steel wool was placed in a separate jar with vinegar only covering half of it. →
We used jars instead of bowls so that the kids could put on a lid (or saran wrap w/ rubber bands) for the transport home.  Once home, they were to uncover them.
The steel wool was to be turned over a few times during the evening, making sure both sides were immersed in the weakly acidic vinegar.  This only needed to be covered halfway because it needed oxygen in order to work. (No lid)  Steel wool  is made mostly of iron, which tends to rust.  Many rocks have iron in them, and can erode from rusting.  Ours didn't rust in one day, but by day two, we saw rust.
Both of these chemical weathering experiments were to simulate how the acid in rainwater can erode things and make them rust.  There isn't a lot of acid in rainwater, so we used vinegar to speed up the process in order to see the results in only a day or two.

We talked about stalactites and stalagmites that grow in caverns from groundwater dripping down through the ceiling of the cavern.
We discussed the Flood a little, and about the different kinds of rocks that are in the layers of the Grand Canyon.
Igneous rock (formed from magma, or lava), sedimentary rock (made from sediments of igneous rock that have weathered and eroded), and metamorphic rock (made from either igneous or sedimentary rock that is under extreme pressure and heat, but not enough heat to melt back to lava).

We went over the different types of unconformities.  An unconformity is a surface of erosion that separates one layer of rock from another, as in the layers of rock found in the Grand Canyon and many other places.
There are nonconformities, disconformities, angular unconformities, and so-called (by evolutionists) paraconformities.
We also learned about intrusions - when magma/lava "intrudes," shooting through several layers of strata.  It looks like it has been inserted there.  If it is perpendicular to the strata, crossing several layers, the intrusion is called a dike.  Sills are intrusions that run parallel to the strata.

sMiLeS,