Knowing how water gets underground (or doesn't get underground because of a surface's impermeability), we decided we wanted our next steps to be if the water that did go underground was clean or not. We know from our contact in KS that her family uses groundwater, but we're not really sure what this means for its quality.
Students suggested we put a camera down INTO THE GROUND, but that wasn't really possible. But Mrs. Brinza turned to youtube and realized there was some work being down by well diggers that could help us see what happens to the water when it goes down deep into the ground, entering a well.
Students suggested we put a camera down INTO THE GROUND, but that wasn't really possible. But Mrs. Brinza turned to youtube and realized there was some work being down by well diggers that could help us see what happens to the water when it goes down deep into the ground, entering a well.
We figured out that the water that reaches the bottom of where the well is drilled is CLEAN!!! What!?!?
We had a really intense conversation about how the water that gets deep into the ground can actually get rid of anything that's in the water by trapping it in the really small spaces that are between the pieces of soil. This was MIND-BLOWING to us that "dirt" or "dirty things" could actually clean water!
We decided to put this new found knowledge into action and design our own filters to clean the dirty water we had sitting on the window ledge. Students had combinations of sand, soil, and gravel to use, and boy did their water get cleaner!
We had a really intense conversation about how the water that gets deep into the ground can actually get rid of anything that's in the water by trapping it in the really small spaces that are between the pieces of soil. This was MIND-BLOWING to us that "dirt" or "dirty things" could actually clean water!
We decided to put this new found knowledge into action and design our own filters to clean the dirty water we had sitting on the window ledge. Students had combinations of sand, soil, and gravel to use, and boy did their water get cleaner!
Despite our water getting cleaner from the small spaces in the earth materials, there were some limitations to our models. We learned from our well video that the average well is around 200ft deep, and our small cup-based models were really small comparatively. So we decided to make a bigger model to see if we get anything different! Regardless, the water is certainly cleaner by sending it through earth-materials rather than using human-made filters (like colanders and coffee filters). We then established consensus for what we figured out!