Hydrology
Concept 1 - Water Properties
Essential Question: What are the physical and chemical properties of fresh
water?
Key Vocabulary: Physical property, Chemical property, cohesion, adhesion, capillary action, specific heat, heat of
vaporization, solvent, transparency, hydrophilic, hydrophobic, pH, acid, base
Concept 2 - Fresh Water Systems
Essential Question: What are the characteristics of the different fresh water
systems?
Essential Question: How does human activity affect these systems?
Key Vocabulary: Watershed, tributary, pond, lake, gradient, discharge, meander, permeable, impermeable, saturated
zone, water table, unsaturated zone, spring, aquifer, artesian well, geyser, Karst topography, sinkhole
Concept 3 - Salt Water Systems
Essential Question: What are the characteristics of the different salt water
systems?
Essential Question: How does human activity affect these systems?
Key Vocabulary: oceanography, wavelength, frequency, amplitude, period, tide, diurnal, semidiurnal, spring tide, neap
tide, salinity, halocline, gradient, Coriolis effect, gyre, El Nino, upwelling, bathymetry, continental shelf, continental
slope, abyssal plain, intertidal zone, neritic zone, open-ocean zone, deep zone
Oceanography Introduction and Waves
1. What are the four branches of oceanography?
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2. What are the six steps of the water cycle?
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3. What are the Earth’s five oceans?
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4. What percentage of the earth is water?
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5. What are three things that a wave’s size depends on?
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6. Does the water actually move in a wave?
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7. What is wavelength?
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8. What is the period of a wave?
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9. What is the frequency of a wave?
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10. What happens to wave height and wavelength as a wave breaks?
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Tides
1. What is the wavelength and frequency of a tsunami?
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2. What are the four things that effect tides?
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3. What does diurnal and semidiurnal mean?
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4. What is the difference between a spring tide and a neap tide?
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Tilly: Timely Tsunami Thinking
On December 26 British schoolgirl Tilly Smith, ten, sensed something was wrong while
on the beach with her family. Her mind kept going back to the geography lesson Mr.
Kearney gave just two weeks before she flew out to a Thai resort with her family.
"The water was swelling and kept coming in," recalled Penny Smith, Tilly's mother.
"There was froth on it like you get on the top of a beer. The sea was like a millpond
before [the swelling began]."
The Smiths, from southeast England, were celebrating Christmas at Maikhao Beach in
Phuket, southern Thailand. Deadly tsunami waves were already on their way—triggered
by a massive earthquake off northern Sumatra earlier that morning.
"The beach was getting smaller and smaller," said Penny Smith, 43. "I felt compelled to
look, but I didn't know what was happening. Then Tilly said she'd just studied this at
school—she talked about tectonic plates and an earthquake under the sea. She got more
and more hysterical. In the end she was screaming at us to get off the beach."
Tilly's father, Colin Smith, 46, said other tourists on the beach were alerted by his
daughter's concerns as he took Tilly and her seven-year-old sister back to the hotel
swimming pool.
Penny Smith added, "I didn't know what a tsunami was, but seeing your daughter so
frightened made you think something serious must be going on."
She remembers seeing a yacht being tipped vertically in the bay. "Then it was as if the
entire sea came out of the water. I was screaming, 'Run!'"
The family took refuge on the third floor of their hotel. Set well back from the shore, it
withstood the surge of three tsunami waves.
"Everything went in the swimming pool—beds, palm trees, the lot," Penny Smith said.
"Even if you hadn't drowned, you would have been hit by something."
If they had stayed on the beach, she believes they wouldn't have made it to safety.
In the disaster's aftermath, the Smiths said, they met people from nearby resorts who had
lost whole families.
Tilly Smith is now back safely at Danes Hill School in Oxshott, Surrey, England. Last
week she told her geography class how the sea slowly rose and started to foam, bubble,
and form whirlpools before the big waves came.
"What Tilly described as happening was exactly the same as I'd shown on a video of a
tsunami that hit the Hawaiian islands [in 1946]," said Andrew F. Kearney, Tilly's
geography teacher. "She saw the consequences of not acting when something strange
happens."
Kearney said topics for year-six pupils (age 10 to 11) include tectonic plates,
earthquakes, and volcanoes.
"We covered tsunamis because they can be caused by earthquakes, volcanoes, or
landslides," he added. "I've taught this particular course for at least 11 years."
Kearney uses audiovisual teaching aids such as interactive white boards to harness
geographic information online (his class often visits nationalgeographic.com). Tilly's
class had looked up U.S. Web sites about tsunami early-warning systems.
"The teacher has a computer on the desk and can project different Web pages onto the
whiteboard," Kearney said. "It's helped make great strides in teaching geography—it
really brings it into the classroom."
Children are also given practical tasks. One of these was to build models of an
earthquake-proof house out of balsa wood. "I put [the models] on a box and shake it to
see which model remains intact the longest," Kearney added.
He's had many hundreds of supportive e-mails from teachers around the world since
Tilly's story was first reported in Britain.
"People often underrate teaching and teachers and they feel it's important to show we can
make a difference," Kearney said.
"Any subject can be dull if it's taught that way," he continued. "You've got to get the
children involved and interested—that's the challenge. If they're just given a dusty old
book and asked to answer some questions, then they're not going to learn much."
While geography remains a popular subject with pupils at Danes Hill, it's a different
picture nationally, according to David Bell, chief inspector of schools in England.
Last November he stated that geography is on the decline in primary and secondary
schools, adding that the subject has become neglected and marginalized.
Questions:
1. What are some indicators that there is a tsunami coming?
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2. What generally creates a tsunami?
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3. How does this story show the importance of science education?
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Ocean Chemistry
1. What are the four major trends in ocean water?
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2. What is salinity?
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Currents
1. What is the Coriolis Effect?
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2. What is a gyre?
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3. What effect does El Nino have on a habitat?
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4. What is upwelling?
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Ocean Floor
1. What is the difference between topography and bathymetry?
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2. What is used to determine depth in the ocean and how does it work?
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3. Name and define three of the six ocean floor features.
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The Ocean Floor
Key Vocabulary: continental slope, trench, basin, continental shelf, and range
Materials: shoebox with a lid, piece of dowel about 25 cm long, pencil, scissors,
graphing paper
Procedure:
4. Place the plastic terrain insert into the bottom of the shoebox.
5. Cut or punch about 8 holes spaced evenly apart down the center of the shoebox
lid.
6. Place the lid on the box concealing the ocean floor.
7. Create a graph using the graph paper with the numbers one to eight along the
bottom and about 1-25 (measurement in cm) up the other side.
8. Once the graph is set up properly, put the dowel rod in hole #1 until it hits
“bottom”. Record the measurement on the graph with a dot.
9. Continue step #5 for holes #2-8.
10. When all of the holes have been measured, join the dots in order using the ruler.
Questions:
1. How does this activity imitate how scientists can map the ocean floor?
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2. How could we create a 3-D image of the ocean floor?
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Ocean Zones and Resources
1. What are the three ocean zones that we have covered so far and what is a
characteristic of each?
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2. What are some characteristics of the deep zone?
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3. What process helps life thrive on hydrothermal vents?
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4. What are some resources we get from the
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ocean?
Oceanography Review
1. What are the five things that waves are characterized by and define
them?
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2. What are the four major trends in ocean water?
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3. What is upwelling and what are its effects?
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4. What are the six features of the ocean floor and define them?
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5. What are the four zones of the ocean and describe them?
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