Thursday 9 April 2009

Yr13 - Tectonics

We started Wednesday's lesson with a reminder about the structure of the earth... We talked about Mr Ogden's biro experiment (but didn't risk setting fire to the Maths Block...). We recapped the different types of plate boundaries that you had looked at while I was in Wales, the processes occurring at each, and the landforms that result.

We then watched the Volcanoes episode of Power of the Planet, where Iain Stewart visited, amongst other places, Erta Ale in Ethiopia ("the first time you're gonna abseil, you kinda didn't want it to be into an active volcano"!) and Thingvellir in Iceland.

We finished with a discussion about the theory of hotspots - still somewhat controversial, but the most commonly accepted explanation for the formation of volcanic islands such as Hawaii, well away from plate boundaries.

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