Tuesday, June 4, 2013
Our teens return!
Our summer session starts today, and the focus of this session is "Water and Energy".
We started today's session by speaking with Mary Ann, Dr. Dan Bain and Dr.Emily Elliot, Energy-Net's stakeholders. They act as our clients, and our job is to create an exhibit on water and energy,which will be completed on August 31, 2013.
Today, we explored watersheds and watershed terms by creating our own using a tarp and a kiddie pool. Topography was created by placing newspaper, egg cartons and other materials underneath. This demonstrated natural topography such as that of the eastern coast of the United States like mountains and valleys, rivers and an ocean. When it "rained" via spray bottle, it could be seen that water would readily run down the impermeable surface of the tarp and into streams, then into rivers before it finally settles into the ocean. We determined that water flows from high elevation to low elevation and that there were actually two watersheds in our experiment.
The introduction of towels to act as permeable surfaces such as forests, parks and yards was seen to have an effect on how the water in each watershed behaved. Furthermore, more materials were dispersed onto the tarp to act as pollutants, such as cocoa powder for dry deposition, dyed water for wet deposition, and dish soap for oil runoff. The permeable surfaces were able to stop some, but not all of the pollutants from being swept downstream and into the ocean.
All photos from this session can be viewed here
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