Earth Systems

Standard III, Objective 2

Title: A Year Without Summer

Description: Students will read an article to help them see how changes in the geosphere affect the other spheres worldwide. They will use this example to make predictions about how other plate movements affect earth systems.

Materials:Reading- The Year Without A Summer, student sheet.

Time Needed: 50 minutes

Procedures:

  1. Hook: Have the students close their eyes. Tell them to imagine that it is the early 1800’s. Have them pretend that they are a farmer. Their whole livelihood depends on the weather. It is spring and it seems a bit cooler than normal, but the crops must be planted. They spend hours plowing and planting their fields. The temperatures don’t seem to get warmer though. In fact, it seems to be getting colder. They wake up one morning in June and their fields are covered in snow. Their crops are ruined. They try to replant, but frost and snow continue into July and August. The temperatures are very cold, summer did not come this year. What was happening? How would they survive? Have the students open their eyes. Have them talk about their thoughts on the situation. What was causing this to happen, how do they feel, what will they do?
  2. Hand out the reading and student sheet. Explain to the students that this really happened in the year 1816 and it was very scary for many people.
  3. Go over the procedures with the students. Have them read the article either individually or as a class. As they read, they need to be looking for and underlining the effects that the volcano in Tambora had on other earth systems.
  4. Go over with the students how the volcano affected other earth systems. This way they have a correct example to go off of to make predictions.
  5. You may want to model how you would go about making predictions for the other earth systems. For example, for mountain, I would think okay, two plates collide, which is convergent. When they collide this increases the elevation. That would change the shape of the geosphere. If there was water on the land before, what would it do? It would probably flow downward now in waterfalls, streams, and rivers. What would the weather be like? As elevation increases it tends to get colder. What would that do to plants and animals? It would most likely alter the biodiversity.

Scoring Guide:

Students participated in the hook discussion…………………………………. 4

Students read and underlined Year Without A Summer…………………….. 4

Students made thoughtful and correct predictions…………………………… 4

Answers to questions:

Data:

1)Put ash into the atmosphere, blocking out solar radiation, making the temperatures colder.

2)Causes a large tsunami, put ash and debris into the water.

3)Killed people, plants, and animals, caused mass migration of humans.

4)Triggered Earthquakes, destroyed habitats.

Analysis:

Answers will vary for 1-4 since they are predictions, but some ideas are outlined below.

1)See procedures, step 4 above.

2)Divergent plate- a. heats the water above, increases convection currents. B. increases the amount of biomass in the area due to extra nutrients.

3)Transform- a. divert waterways, pollute them with falling debris, b.- kill plants and animals, geosphere- habitat destruction, may trigger volcanoes.

4)Diveregent- water would pool up in the valley, weather would be warmer, more moist, biodiversity would be altered.

5)Studying plate movement and its affects on earth lets us see what land formations are made. We can then look at other planets and predict what plate movement happened in the past or is still occurring.

6)A group of interdependent parts that work together to make a whole.

7)Plate tectonics is just one part of the earth system. If you change any part of a system, the other parts will be affected as well. Since plate tectonics involves the geosphere, and all other earth systems touch and interact with the geosphere, they will all be affected.

Student Sheet

Name______Period______

Title:A Year Without Summer

Introduction: As you have learned throughout this year, the earth works as a system, a group of interdependent parts that work together to form a whole. You cannot have a change in one system without affecting the other systems. So when there is a change in the geosphere through the activities of plate tectonics, we will also see changes in the atmosphere, biosphere, and hydrosphere. This activity will help you understand some of those changes and make predictions about others.

Procedures:

  1. Read the article The Year Without A Summer.
  2. As you read look for and underline the ways that the volcano affected other earth systems. Remember to look for effects on the biosphere, hydrosphere, geosphere, and atmosphere. There can be more than 1 effect for each one.
  3. Predict how other plate tectonic activities can affect other earth systems.

Data:

  1. How did the Tambora volcano affect the atmosphere?
  1. How did the Tambora volcano affect the hydrosphere?
  1. How did the Tambora volcano affect the biosphere?
  1. How did the Tambora volcano affect the geosphere?

Analysis:

Now that you have the example above, you will make predictions for how other plate tectonic activities affect earth systems. Remember a prediction is using scientific thought to analyze what might happen. For each plate activity, tell what type of plate boundary causes it to form and how each of these plate activities affects other Earth systems.

1)Mountain building- Type of plate movement:

  1. Hydrosphere-
  2. Biosphere (plants and animals)-
  3. Atmosphere-
  4. Geosphere-

2)Seafloor spreading (Upwelling of nutrients from ocean vents)- Type of plate movement-

  1. Hydrosphere-
  2. Biosphere-

3)Earthquakes- Type of plate movement-

  1. Hydrosphere-
  2. Biosphere-
  3. Geosphere-

4)Valleys- Type of plate movement-

  1. Hydrosphere-
  2. Biosphere-
  3. Atmosphere-

5)How does studying the effects of plate movement on earth tell us about the planets around us?

6)What is a system?

7)Why does the system of plate tectonics affect so many other things?

Conclusion: What is something you learned today?

Reading

The year without a summer: A volcano changes weather in 1816

Modified from W. B. Jones
Robertson County Historical Society

We all find ourselves complaining about how hot it got this summer and some say they can remember when it was hotter. But there was a year in our history that in some parts of the U.S. there was no summer. Actually there was more than one year, but the one that is mostly referred to when the “Year Without A Summer” is mentioned is in the year 1816.
In April of 1815 the volcano, Tambora, erupted East of Java. 92,000 people were killed immediately. The earthquakes triggered by the eruption caused a large tsunami, even though the volcano itself was not located in the sea. It was believed to be one of the most explosive eruptions within 10,000 years.
The eruption put more than 150 tons of dust into the atmosphere, which slowly moved around the world. This dust blocked the incoming solar radiation from the sun and thus caused the earth to cool. This changed the weather patterns for the U.S. and other countries in the Northern Hemisphere. The northern states were affected more than the southern states with changes in seasonal patterns and crop harvesting. Utah only experienced temperatures that were about 15 to 20 degrees below normal. However, in New York there were frosts in every month of the year. At the time scientists blamed sunspots for the unseasonable weather. Communications were not as good as they are today so many people just speculated about what was happening. Some people thought it may be the end of the world.
In Canada, between May and September, Quebec had a series of cold waves which killed crops and led to near famine conditions. Between June 6th and 10th, there was a foot of snow on the ground. Sub-zero temperatures in June blackened the crops and killed wildfowl.
In the New England states crops failed and food became very scarce which caused a mass movement of population or migration to the West the following year. This led to a shift in farming away from the Eastern part of the U.S. Just as migration of the population happened in the Dust Bowl in the 1930s the people who moved on to another location did not return. Because of bad weather one summer 200 years ago, farming changed in the U.S. forever. This is probably what we will see in New Orleans after the Hurricane Katrina disaster. Historically people do not return after disasters such as these.
In Europe the effects were worse than the U.S. due to the larger population at that time. There were famines and crop failures there also. There were food riots in France and Switzerland and at least 200,000 died from hunger due to the weather change.
Tambora was not the only volcano to erupt at the time. There were many other volcanic eruptions during the period of 1812-1817 that led to the overcast sky and cooling of the earth's surface around the world. Can it happen again? It sure can. It has happened throughout the history of the earth and will continue to occur in the future.