Earth's Inner Secrets Unit Reflection

Earth’s Inner Secrets Unit Reflection

Hello everyone, and here I am back to feed you and excite you with new (or old) facts about anything (that has to do with science)! These last few months we have been working on Earth’s Inner Secrets. Plate tectonics, volcanoes, minerals and mining are all part of inner Earth. You have seen a lot of blog posts on all of these things, but this is the final one and I hope I remind you of some of the things you might want to search more about in your free time! Here we go…

Have you ever thought that humans have discovered everything and that of course there are many more things they could find out but what they know about now has no more secrets? Well you are mistaken. They might know all about what pencils are made up of, and what is inside an eye, but what how about what is inside the Earth. Have you ever met anyone who said that they can explain everything that’s going on inside of our Earth without hesitation? Definitely not. And if you have, call them up and ask them what exactly is found in Earth, and how deep have scientists actually gone compared to how deep (they think) Earth is. You’ll find that they have dug very little, and no one (yet) can describe what is found in the Earth because we’ve never gone so deep!

The things that we have found, of course are many. For example you should all know about the Earth’s layers, how many there are, and what each one has inside. There are five layers; crust (the strip or thin skin of the Earth that is the piece we walk on), the upper and lower mantle (composed of liquid magma that moves with convection), the outer core (still liquidy but getting harder), and finally inner core which is solid iron!

Another thing that we know a lot about are some minerals, as you must already know, are created deep under the Earth’s surface when steaming hot magma cools creating some minerals such as diamonds! These minerals are igneous. How do people, scientists, get the diamonds when they are formed very deep inside our world? Volcanoes!!! Some people say that volcanoes are the opening to the secret world under our feet because they give a passage way that can go very deep, straight into the mantle. Of course, the only thing missing is the ability to send machines or humans down there without burning them! There are three main types of volcanoes; shield, which is low and open, cone, which is higher and thinner, and composite which has many layers of magma which have piled on year after year, eruption after eruption!

Going back to the minerals, we learned a lot on how minerals are identified as minerals, not only which ones are found below earth’s surface. The thing that helps people remember how you identify a mineral is SNIFC. It’s not nonsense, as most of the people from my class thought when they first saw it. Each letter stands for something. So, a mineral has to be; Solid, Naturally occurring, inorganic process, fixed chemical composition, and have a crystalline structure! Now it makes sense, right? Moh’s hardness scale also helps a lot when you are trying to identify a mineral.

MINING! A lovely word, but what does it mean? Mining is when you dig for minerals either underground or relatively close to the surface. Those were the two types of mining. There are laws to mining or else the world would be in a big mess. They are all stated in the reclamation act, and the main one is that after you mine you have to clean up your mess!

The last important thing we learned in this unit was rocks. Rocks are one of the most common things found on this planet! There are three types of rock: Igneous (made when magma/lava cools and hardens), sedimentary (made up of sediments that joined and compressed), and metamorphic (rocks that were once sedimentary or igneous and transformed into something else). Rocks are made up of minerals sometimes, which is really cool!

Thank you for joining me again on my awesome science blog posts. I really appreciate the time you took to read through this, because I know it’s kind of long! Good bye!