Students are recognizing that changes to the surface might be driven by what's below the surface. So we agreed to think about what's below the Earth's surface locally and at each of our mountain locations. Since people have long mined the Earth, we agreed that learning more about mining might be helpful, too.
Right here in Louisville there's lots of natural Earth materials on the surface: loose rocks, dirt, solid rock (look at those nearby mountains), and even water! Known as a mining town, there's evidence the surface has been altered too, to extract various things like coal.
We watched this video about the Resolution Mine in Arizona (again, not terribly far from us compared to Everest). We then began looking at photographic evidence of what's at and below the surface at our mountain locations.
Right here in Louisville there's lots of natural Earth materials on the surface: loose rocks, dirt, solid rock (look at those nearby mountains), and even water! Known as a mining town, there's evidence the surface has been altered too, to extract various things like coal.
We watched this video about the Resolution Mine in Arizona (again, not terribly far from us compared to Everest). We then began looking at photographic evidence of what's at and below the surface at our mountain locations.
All of the locations have something obvious in common--there is solid rock at the surface that's visible and it continues well below the surface, miles deep. We know that there are various minerals that are mined below (i.e. feldspar, gold, and copper to name a few)! We also saw from the mining video that it gets SUPER hot the farther down you dig. At nearly 1.3miles down into the Resolution mine's shaft, it was 180 degrees Fahrenheit! Yikes!