Day Seven

Reflect on the expansion of water and salt water experiments you and your classmates performed. What are some of the interesting results and struggles with this experiment.

Relate your thoughts on this experiment to the scientific question "Is the earth warming?"

Some interesting things with this experiment, and something many of us found in common was that it was difficult to measure the ice. Overall, we found that adding salt to the water lowers the temperature of the ice. It was difficult to do the experiment because originally we wanted to take it out after 15 minutes, but that was not enough time. So instead we waited 30 minutes and this worked out well. The difficulties of this experiment were all things that normal scientists go through: trial and error! It was toughest to measure the last one because this was when the water was frozen over the most so we had to poke a hole in t. Poking a hole in the ice probably had an effect on the measurements, and lost a few centimeters in there. This puts our experiment in a tight situation because it's not totally reliable. Comparing results to other classmates is helpful, in seeing if we had similar results. But on the other hand, everyone experiment was done a little differently so that makes it hard to compare results. It's important to know all of the different ways people think up experiments.

In relation to global warming, I would say that this experiment helps only a little bit in understanding the harm we are doing to the earth. Global warming is the increase in average temperature of the Earths surface due to the trap of heat and light from the sun. Just as we did in our experiment, the temperature was being affected. With global warming, the longer we don't do anything about it, the more it is going to be affected. The sun is beating down on the earth's surface, heating it up. The ice was in the freezer for a period of time, cooling it down an freezing it. The cold is getting trapped in our experiment, like the sun is getting trapped in the earth and warming it.  It is hard to understand what is happening to the earth because there are many scientists out there, trying to measure it in different ways. The earth's temperature changes constantly due to the seasons, and this also makes it tough to measure.