The Search for Oil

Well, here's another post about science class. Well what can I say, science class is pretty cool! Anyway, this time our teacher had invited a guest to come and teach us about locating oil. This teacher had come before this so it wasn't like it was awkward to watch or to listen to. Well she studies as a geologist and she has worked with an oil company before, locating oil. She taught us that oil needed three things to form they are the trap, the source, and the reservoir. The reservoir is the holding place for the oil. The trap is like the lid of the reservoir without it the source would come out of the reservoir. The source is the dead animals and plants that rot and become oil. Then, she gave us three maps with grids one for the reservoir, one for the trap, and one for the source. With this we made one map with all of these things to form oil. After this, she showed us to our lab tables where there were aluminum pans with aluminum foil over the top and a grid. What we had to do is find the oil reservoirs in the aluminum pan with our maps that we made! It was soooooooooo much fun, my group did a pretty good job, we got more than a half of our guesses correct. I think that the way that people get oil is REALLY cool. They do it with oil rigs. Here are three types of oil rigs, jack up rigs, platforms, and semisubmersable rigs. Jack up rigs are moble, they do not float over to their drilling spots. It has long structures that serve as legs and lower the rig into the seabed. Platform rigs can be built of steel or concrete. They rest on the sea floor and when oil is located a platform can be built to drill farther down to the site. Semisubmersable rigs are floating drilling rigs, they are moved by wave actions and a lot of them are under water.
We also learned that it costs A LOT of money to drill so the art of oil locating is very excact, and if you are in the buisness you have to be exact or you get fired. To me, oil is a big part of my everyday life, and learning about it just makes me think all that work was put into getting me to school everyday. I think its really cool.

For more information check out http://www.rigjobs.co.uk/oil/oilrigs.html and/or http://www.rigjobs.co.uk/oil/oilrigs.html.

Also check out this awesome video! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xvPTcTDlpgQ&feature=related

P.S this is color coded regular sentences are purple, source info is green, navy blue is my notes, and my opinions are grey.

Painting with Bubbles

I bet you have never thought blowing a bubble was science. Well I've never thought this either until a few weeks ago when my 7th grade class did a lesson on bubbles. It was very fun. Our teacher mixed bubble soap with different colors of paint, then she gave us straws to blow into the mixture, the mixture made bubbles and we put paper over the mixture to make a very pretty design. The pictures came out great, I took mine home and stuck it on my refrigderator! But there is more to it than that, what is the science behind it all? Is the mixture of soap and paint a compound, a mixture, or an element? When were soap and paint created? What makes you see the colors of the paint? Whats the point of blowing bubbles anyway? Well you can learn this and more right here!

Firstly, the mixture of paint and soap is a heterogeneous mixture because the two substances are mixed together but you can see the different ingredients in it. Paint was invented by cave dwellers. They painted pictures of animals. These paintings date back to about 30,000-10,000 bc. The first paints were composed of a basic four ingredients, pigments, binders (otherwise known as vehicles),volatile solvents and additives. The first bubbling soap was made by the ancient Romans in the middle ages. But I think the color is the cool part, but why is it that you can see color? You can see the colored bubbles on the paper because of light perception. Because color is the sensation that is stirred when light shines on the retina of the eye. Light can be seen either as directly from a light source or as reflected light. White light seems colorless because the eye is acustomed to the characteristics of this light. One really cool reason blowing bubbles is used is to calm your stress. It is belived by many scientists that blowing bubbles calms stress. This is why you feel good when you take a nice bubble bath! So now that you know all this cool stuff about bubble pictures you should try it, it is very fun and a great laugh if you do it with a few friends!

For more info on this subject ask your school librarian for your schools' password to http://www.go.grolier.com/!!

Log on! : )

(Note: this post is color coded. My facts are in brown, my other source is in green, the intro to the hyperlink is red, the hyperlink is blue, and the rest is navy blue!! Thanks for reading!!!!) :)

PS. my smilies' are in yellow!