What it is...
So, check out the following two websites and post a comment (meaning something learned or interesting) on each
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/geopedia/Earth_Scars#Target%20Earth
http://www.smm.org/deadzone/
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15 comments:
Asteroids are pieces of rock or metal or both; comets are chunks of ice, dust, and rocks that orbit much further around the sun. I thought it was interesting how the names of different space missions on asteroids or comets are the names of movies also: Stardust and Deep Impact. The 1/45000 chance of the asteroid Apophis colliding with us in 2036 is quite amazing and also rather disturbing. But I found it cool how scientists were able to predict the exact date of the possibility of collision (April 13).
The Gulf of Mexico Dead Zone is an area of the gulf that lacks sufficient amounts of oxygen to support life deep below the surface. It is formed because freshwater from the Mississippi River packed with an excess of nutrients is dumped into the gulf, and with the help of a number of factors, such as weather and the effect of density layering, that water stays on the surface, causing algae and stuff to grow. When these die, they sink to the bottom and drain the oxygen supply, and because the freshwater on top prevents oxygen from the atmosphere to reach the denser and warmer saltwater below, the deeper levels of the sea are deprived of oxygen and things die or run away. =[ This is the "Dead Zone" and I felt bad for the little shrimps and worms...
Asteroids and comets are relatively small objects. I thought it was interesting how the asteroid was only 900 feet and when i was watching discovery they said it would be huge, causing mass destruction. The fact that the scientits know when the asteroid will hit is incredeible and that they know the year it will stike. I have a question, if a asteroid does strike earth how will we know when to send a nuclear bomb out? The dead zone is pretty cool and it seems as if the area changes allot so that would be a potential danger to the world, what if there is a current that carries the non oxygen water a long way? surley it would mean world wide devestation for sea life.
First website
Rocky asteroids and icy comets have been moving since the formation of the Earth 4, 5 billon years ago. The most famous impact of all was when a comet or an asteroid felt on the Earth and killed all dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Even though the impacts have been rare, they are still moving and could destroy the Earth. Our planet has been bombarded before, only 174 scars from impacts have been found. But we are now protected. Scientists are always working on methods to protect humanity. Almost all of the objects that could collide with Earth are asteroids.
Second website
The Gulf of Mexico Dead Zone is a large region of water that is very low in oxygen, and cannot support life. Its size changes every year, caused by the weather. Freshwater from the Mississippi River floats on top of salty water. They are a lot of algae. When they die, the sink into the saltier water below and decompose, using up the oxygen in the deeper water. Starved from oxygen, any living thing dies. This is why they called it Dead Zone.
That first website sortof scared me... Ateroids of about 140m+ can cause catastrophic collisions... and in the words of the author:
'However, large comets can sneak up on us, and if one does, we might not have time to deflect a collision that could result in planetwide destruction.' Despite all their technologic gadgets, something could go terribly wrong... this is not scary in itself, i have heard it before, but usually scientists are very sure about how their gadgets will work, and it is not often that you hear them admit equipment may be faulty so bluntly... but anyways, i found this site really interesting. The second one two. I have never even heard Dead Zones... I wonder why not? I thought i was really cool though, but also strange. I also found this site somewhat discomforting, just like the first one. If these Dead Zones grow, it could be disastrous for so many ecosystems, and there may be people that depend on those ecosystems to make a living, say tourism or fishing communities. I agree with Yongnak... poor little shrimps and worms (lets not forget the plankton!) :(
The asteroid website tells you the difference between asteroids and comets. Asteroids are peices of metal mixed with rocks that fly orbit around the sun. Comets are dust or ice that also fly around but a lot further from the sun. I found interesting that scientist could see if a comet was going to come towards us at some point but obviously they aren't very accurate because ever couple of years or so we hear a story about one coming straight towards us and the end of the world coming. The second website was very interesting because before reading it I had never heard of the dead zone.
Asteroids are rocky comets which have been bombarding Earth since its formation 4.5 billion years ago. I found the information really interesting. I have heard about asteroids before, but i have never really been interested in finding out more about it. It is really interesting to find out that even though thousand of asteroids have bombarded the earth, only 174 scars have been found.
The Gulf of Mexico Dead Zone is a large region of water that can't support life because it has low oxygen. The dead zone is formed when the Mississippi river(fresh water) flows into the gulf (salty water). This stops oxygen from going through and therefore the fish die or go away. Most of the world's coastlines are like this.
Both experiments were very interesting and it made it easier to understand.
i found the part about the deadzone in The Gulf of Mexico was appealing to me. The part that was most shocking to me was that, we, humans are the ones who cause it.But the effects are even more shocking. we actually are hurting our own economy because we're hurting the shrimp and that is a big industry down there
For the second article i thought it was interesting, the teqniques that scientist were planning to use to combat asteroids, like fire thing into the air to collide with the asteroid to make it into smller pieces
I thought it was pretty cool that we have gone up in space and been on the moon.
I just found out that what i call a shooting star is a Comet, and that it can travel over 250miles though space.
Plus i found out that the Gulf of Mexico is a Deadzone.
All very interesting indeed. Love astrology already :P Im still amazed at how big some can be, their huge! its also cool how the atmosphere protects us from them by burning them up before the hit the ground. Deadzone is like a graveyard for dead plants i guess (algea mainly ofc) Algae can be horrible, their like a natural pollution. Evolution should make more creatures that eat algae to maintain balance :P. I guess, like what the movie Armagedon pertrays, we can protect ourselves from these astroids if, the very unlikely chance, one will come for earth we can bombard it with all sorts of stuff to split itno smaller pieces that our atmosphere can disintegrate. Deadzones again just suck, i wonder what purpose they have, preventing overpopulation of shrimp, ect?
Learnt that these asteroids and smal rocky objects have been around for more than i could imagine. I thought these were just small threats like WOWOWOW we saw an asteroid today but apparently they are not as uncommon as i expected. I was also amazed at the fact that they HOPE to have technologies to stop these from impacting us but lets say one of them was headed for us today, it happened before and it will happen again! (armageddon)
About the dead zone! WOWOW! i never expected that somethign like this was possible but i thought that the reason was alittle vague. I would have thought the reason for the dead zone was humans and pollution etc, stuff like that, its not as worrying when the dead zone is caused by algae =.= i think the name dead zone also bows up the whole thing cause it sounds so serious, like a massacre or something. I think that it is not that big of a deal because there are way more important things to worry about than a few algae =.=
during class we were wrong!!! we all agreed that asteroids varied between a few feet and 6 miles but.... they get bigger. some are "moon-size" meaning a couple hundres miles wide. i also find it pretty cool how sometimes they are a big chunk of metal while in other situation its a big group of many asteroids held together by they gravity of the whole thing. however i dont find the dead zone too interesting, to me its just another natural phenomenom that has to much information about it to be such a big deal. the reason i prefer comets and asteroids is because there is sooo much about that is still to be found out.
also responding to geoffrey, its not on a big scale, but in class mr. philen mentioned the food chain. fish eat the algea, and bigger fish eat those fish, and humans eat the bigger fish. so for example if the dead zone spread and moved to an area where the economy was highly based on fishing, it would become a big deal. Not wordly, but a big deal to many.
I think it is interesting that so much is still unknown about how the dinosaurs became extinct and all there is is just scientists' theories. I also think it is interesting how there are thousands of asteroids out in the asteroid belt between Jupiter and Mars that no one knows when they will strike Earth. I also learned that the dead zone does not only affect the animals whose lives are at risk but it also affects us. If fishermen can not get sea food (there is a pretty interesting story about a fishermen on the second website), we can not eat seafood. And also, the nutrients from the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico cause excessive plant and algae growth in tens of thousands of freshwater lakes across the US. I still don't know how the asteroids and comets and the dead zone are connected, but they both affect the Earth.
Asteroids are huge chunks of rock taht are comprised of rock (duh) and sometimes metal (didn't know that :}) I kind of got freaked out of the possibility of there being a colliosion. Then again ther have been so many stories like it. So many times when we could have gotten hit but didn't. sometimes i think we get a bit too paranoid and blow thing out of proportion. We should maybe re-inspect the idea in 24 years and if the chancve of us getting anhilated by it is still there we should destroy it> better safe than sorry i always believed.
About the deadzone-knarly! I never knew such a thing existed. Now that i do i wanna do some research of my own about it. But this just reveals to me how destructive we humans are to our environment. The even sadder thing is also how un-atuned we are to it as well. I never heard of the deadzone and it seems like a big deal, why hasn't there been media coverage on it and if there was why wasn't it international. i think that this is a prfect example about what we humans are capable of. We need to see such stories like this out there and documentaries of things like it made io order to inform the public to creaste more awareness. We shouldn't wait until the pointing-finger stage when we wonder how we got to where we are and try to find someone else to pin the blame to, when the blame is on all of us.
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