Northern Africa

Watch this two minute video on the Sahara Desert.

Discover Northern Africa (5 min) and then comment with five facts that you learned. Do not repeat facts that other students have already mentioned.


Play this game but make sure that you choose NORTH AFRICA from the drop down menu. 

Introduction to Africa

Watch this Introduction to Africa  

10 minutes Write down ten facts you learned about Africa on a piece of paper to turn in next week. 

Watch the video: 

25 Amazing Things You 

Probably Didn't Know About Africa

Video: See How Skateboarding Is Changing Lives in Rural South Africa

Volcanoes

Hi all ... I write this from Kadlec Hospital as I watch my sweet daughter sleep. She had an abscess in her throat and we went to the ER. They decided to remove her tonsils so I am sleeping here with her tonight. Hopefully we will go home tomorrow afternoon sometime. I am so sorry about having to cancel class. :(  I will see you on Wednesday for sure!! 

How do Volcanologists use maps? 

Volcanoes can be exciting and fascinating, but also very dangerous.  Understanding what a volcano can do is the first step in mitigating volcanic hazards, but it is important to remember that even if scientists have studied a volcano for decades, they do not necessarily know everything it is capable of. Volcanoes are natural systems, and always have some element of unpredictability. 

Volcanologists are always working to understand how volcanic hazards behave, and what can be done to avoid them. Collecting and analyzing samples of lava and deadly gases are just a couple tools in the volcanologist’s box; here are some of the other—safer—ways they study volcanoes:

Measure seismic activity: Earthquakes are an early warning sign that something is going on underground with a volcano. The rumblings can be difficult to interpret, but an increase in activity often presages an eruption.

Measure ground movements: Scientists often set up sensitive tiltmeters that can detect the tiniest changes in the shape of a volcano’s surface. Before an eruption, the volcano may start to bulge as magma accumulates closer to the surface. Before Mount St. Helens erupted in 1980, the north side of the volcano visible bulged, but more often this deformation is detectable only with sophisticated equipment.

Take the volcano’s temperature: If a volcanologist wants to see how hot a volcano has become and which lava flows are newer (and hotter), there’s no need to get up close. A thermal imaging camera on an airplane or satellite can take a picture and identify the hot spots.

Check on its geophysical properties: Minute changes in the electrical conductivity, magnetic field and even gravity around a volcano can indicate that something is brewing beneath the surface.

Map it in three dimensions: A 3-D map of all the nooks and crannies on the surface of a volcano can help scientists make predictions about where the lava will flow and who is most in danger in the event of an eruption.

Study the volcano’s past: Scientists examine geologic deposits to learn about past eruptions, which can give important clues to what a volcano may do in the future

Watch: Volcano 101 | National Geographic (3 min)

Watch: Inside A Volcano (4.35)

Look at this site and notice that  it highlights the ten most famous volcanoes. 

Each of you choose one volcano, do a little 

research and tell us three important facts about it. 

You have two worksheets that will be due on Wednesday: 

• Famous Volcanoes Latitude and Longitude practice worksheet. Disregard the directions on the worksheet. You only need to locate these top ten volcanoes on the map. 
• Road Maps worksheet

Latitude & Longitude

So you're looking at a map and you want to know where a city or a place is. And you want to tell someone else. How do you do it?

Let's say you want to tell your friend where Paris is. You could give its RELATIVE LOCATION.

You could say, "Well, it's in France." OR You could say, "France is south of England or East of Spain" That might work. Relative location refers to locating a place relative to other landmarks. It is the most common way to describe where a place is. 

But what if your friend wants to know exactly where Paris is? You need to use latitude and longitude. This is ABSOLUTE LOCATION. It is exact location using the grid lines on a map or globe. 

Latitude and longitude are two of the most basics terms in all of geography. To understand them, you need to think of Earth as a globe. Further, you need to think of the globe as divided into lots of little sections. Some go east. Some go west. Some go north. Some go south.

Latitude
Horizontal mapping lines on Earth are lines of latitude. They are known as "parallels" of latitude, because they run parallel to the equator. One simple way to visualize this might be to think about having imaginary horizontal "hula hoops" around the earth, with the biggest hoop around the equator, and then progressively smaller ones stacked above and below it to reach the North and South Poles

Latitude lines are a numerical way to measure how far north or south of the equator a place is located. The equator is the starting point for measuring latitude--that's why it's marked as 0 degrees latitude. The number of latitude degrees will be larger the further away from the equator the place is located, all the way up to 90 degrees latitude at the poles. Latitude locations are given as __ degrees North or __ degrees South.

Longitude

Vertical mapping lines on Earth are lines of longitude, known as "meridians". One simple way to visualize this might be to think about having hula hoops cut in half, vertically positioned with one end at the North Pole and the other at the South Pole.

Longitude lines are a numerical way to show/measure how far a location is east or west of a universal vertical line called the Prime Meridian. This Prime Meridian line runs vertically, north and south, right over the British Royal Observatory in Greenwich England, from the North Pole to the South Pole. As the vertical starting point for longitude, the Prime Meridian is numbered 0 degrees longitude.

To measure longitude east or west of the Prime Meridian, there are 180 vertical longitude lines east of the Prime Meridian and 180 vertical longitude lines west of the Prime Meridian, so longitude locations are given as __ degrees east or __ degrees west. The 180 degree line is a single vertical line called the International Date Line, and it is directly opposite of the Prime Meridian.

Spend three minutes watching this video about Latitude and Longitude. 

Spend three more minutes singing about it because its good for you to hear the information in more than one way. :) 

Comment: If you were to visit any city in the world where would it be? Tell us and provide us with the relative location and absolute location. 

Time Zones

As the Earth rotates on its axis, the Sun shines on only one part of the Earth at a time. While the sun shines where you live, it’s nighttime somewhere else.

When you’re eating your breakfast cereal, children in Paris are finishing the school day and children in Moscow are eating dinner. Children in Bangkok are going to bed and children in Sydney, Australia are getting up for the next day of school.

It wouldn’t make sense for us to be on the same time zone. Instead, countries all over the world are divided into time zones, based loosely on longitudinal bands. Large countries, such as the U.S. and Russia, may be divided into three or more time zones, but most countries fall in one zone.

credit: http://easyscienceforkids.com/all-about-the-time-zone/ 

Just because it’s 3 p.m. in New York doesn’t mean it’s that time in Los Angeles. In fact, it’s noon in L.A.

Why? 

 Time Zones... of course. It makes sense that most countries want to have a standard number of hours for daylight, no matter what part of the  country that you live in. 

Let’s say you go to school at 8 a.m. Is the Sun up? More than likely. But when the Sun comes up before 8 a.m. in New York, kids who go to school in California would have to go to school in the dark if they had to go at the same time as you do. 

Why? 

Everyone on the planet wants the sun to be at its highest point in the sky (crossing the meridian) at noon. If there were just one time zone, this would be impossible because the Earth rotates 15 degrees every hour. 

The idea behind multiple time zones is to divide the world into 24 15-degree slices and set the clocks accordingly in each zone. All of the people in a given zone set their clocks the same way, and each zone is one hour different from the next.

We didn’t always have time zones, though. For thousands of years, people didn’t even keep track of time at all, at least not in the way that we know. Sundials, water clocks, and other time pieces marked the passage of the Sun across the sky, but nobody was talking about seconds, minutes, or hours way back then.

A few hundred years ago, clocks and watches were invented and timekeeping became a focus for many people. But nobody really had an idea yet that time zones were needed.

It wasn’t until 1878 that it was proposed to divide the world into 24 time zones, each spaced a certain distance apart, according to measurements made on a globe. This arrangement was adopted by many countries. 

It divided the United States into four time zones: Eastern, Central, Mountain, and Pacific. 

American railroad companies helped by using the time zones for their train schedules. The railroad had exploded across the American landscape by this time, and the train companies wanted their trains to run on time. An agreement between the major companies was put forth in 1883. The agreement established an official time as well. Central Time and Mountain Time might differ by an hour, but they differed by exactly an hour.

Finally, in 1918, Congress passed the Standard Time Act, which made the four time zones official. The Eastern, Central, Mountain, and Pacific time zones were now enforced by federal law. Clocks were also set to a certain time on the minute hand as well. Before, time varied from place to place depending on what time people thought it was.     

The map dividing the U.S. into the four time zones doesn’t always go straight down state lines. Some states, for instance, are in two different time zones. Florida, Indiana, Kentucky and Tennessee are part of both the Eastern and Central time zones. Kansas, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Texas are part of both the Central and Mountain time zones. And Idaho and Oregon are part of both the Mountain and Pacific time zones.

So, as you take a trip through Tennessee, you might see clocks that say two different times. It just depends on whether you’re in eastern or western Tennessee. Why is this the case? Well, for one thing, not all the states had become states yet when the railroad companies started using their time zones in 1883. Not even by 1918 were all the states in the Union yet. Hawaii, the last of the 50 states, became a state in 1959. (Hawaii and Alaska are entirely different matters because they’re so far to the west. Hawaii is three hours behind California; Alaska is one hour behind.)

What does all this mean? It means that the more you travel in the United States, the more you’ll need to check your watch!

Video about Time Zones (3.11)

Watch The Zip Line Across Time Zones (2.02)

Just for fun check out what time it is in another country 

For fun: Video about Understanding Day Lights Savings Time (2.32)

Comment: What do you think of the idea of One Time Zone for the Whole World? (4.51)

Introduction 2

Watch: 
Changing the World with Maps   



Then click on this link and watch any video of your choosing in order to discover how the use of maps have been used. 

Look at this link for help with your Landform assignment. 

Comment:  How has mapping various areas been used for the good of everyone? 

Introduction

Watch this three minute video titled 

"What can you do with geography?"

Comment: 

Why is it important to know geography?  

Which speaker did you find most interesting in this video. Why?