Today's focus will be on the carbon cycle. We've talked about a few cycles already.
You'll see some similarities, but our vocab words will be pretty different.
We want to be able to label those vocab words on a picture, or diagram, of the carbon cycle such as
photosynthesis, combustion, decomposition.
Um, and we want to make sure we can list an example of each sphere that carbon is in.
And along with those key vocab words, we want to be able to know where the carbon begins and where it ends.
So how is it going from one sphere, or one item, to the next in each vocab term?
So once you start out on the right hand side, there on the top, just list three things that are living.
Okay. List out three things. And as you do that think about what are those three things have in common?
Of course, they're living but they're all gonna have one thing in common and that is carbon.
Carbon is the building block for all living things.
All life forms are carbon-based.
So when we're trying to figure out if there's life somewhere, like on another planet or a really extreme area of the Earth,
that's the main element that scientists look for. It is the fourth most abundant element present here on earth.
And the reason why it's so important and reliable in all these different forms is
it can bond to several other common elements.
So it is one of the main elements found in cells
because it can bond to all these other elements like hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and sulfur.
So we see a diagram here where carbon is moving around and we want to figure out,
well, what are the spheres that carbon is moving in and out of?
So go ahead and pause the video and list out all the spheres that you see,
and then an example of where you see them in this picture and what they're gonna have carbon.
So, I'll pause the video, list out your spheres, and what item in that sphere you see carbon.
Now we already told, on a couple slides before, that we know carbon is the building block for all living things.
We see a couple living things in this diagram. We see the animals, of course.
You know we see the plants. So we know carbon can be found in all living things, both plants and animals.
We see up here on the diagram CO2 in the atmosphere,
so we know that carbon is a key part of the atmosphere.
We also see it going down here into the ground, into the soil, and in the rock.
We don't actually see any hydrosphere on this diagram,
but I will tell you that carbon can be found in water as well.
So we know that carbon is found in all four of Earth's spheres
So a few examples of where carbon lives in the nonliving environment, other than plants and animals.
We have carbon in the atmosphere, like we said, listed as CO2 or carbon dioxide.
We know that carbon in the water, one of the most common types in the water, would be carbonic acid.
And finally found in the geosphere, in the rock and the soil, some common examples of carbon would be in limestone.
Would be underground to create fossil fuels, things like coal, oil, and natural gas.
And also in dead organic matter.
So when bio things die out, like plants die out, animals die out, and they decompose and they hang out in the ground.
We also count that as part of the geosphere.
So we want to create an image on our notes to represent the carbon cycle
and include arrows and labels for all the different terms in our carbon cycle.
Here is a link that you can use from your notes, or here, to see a moving diagram similar to our,
but we're gonna make one from scratch here.
So on the bottom of your paper, you can recreate a simple drawing like mine,
including some of the basic parts of the carbon cycle, like for instance, the ground, right?
So I can get a ground level in there. We want to have some trees.
Here on the right side, we want to have a factory or some kind of building emitting
material into the atmosphere.
We want to have some water.
And then we also want to have some animals.  I've chosen a bear and a raccoon to be my little critters.
Now we are gonna focus quite a bit about carbon in the atmosphere,
but we also want to know where is that carbon coming from and one of the main places here is from coal.
Coal is another key part of the carbon cycle.
And we just want to talk here real quick about how the carbon forms.
So we've got dead plant matter that has now formed a layer within the ground.
When plants have died or animals have died in large masses like swamps or forests,
we get that layer in the earth of the plant matter.
Over time, heat and pressure play a very large role in the process of coal formation.
Heat and pressure strengthen this dead organic matter
into the next stage called lignite.
Okay, lignite continues to harden underground with additional heat and pressure,
eventually becoming what we call anthracite, or hard coal.
That's the type of coal that we use as a fossil fuel.
That is the type of coal that we use to create in Rosemount area electricity.
So heat and pressure are our key terms as organic plant matter is stored underground.
Over millions of years we're talking.
Millions of years that plant material then can become usable fossil fuels or coal.
Just a quick image of where that coal forms. We can see the coal deposits, this grey down here.
Okay, these would once be horizontal layers on the Earth's surface.
Over time we had soil pile up on top and then with heat and pressure, they became coal.
And then we of course have to extract them, dig them out, like we're seeing here
to use them for our power plants.
So now that we're ready to put some labels on our diagram, let's talk about the different terms.
The first set of terms we're going to look at is talking about how carbon gets into the atmosphere.
So we have carbon going from locations, or from objects, into the atmosphere.
Number one is going to be respiration. Respiration is releasing CO2, again putting it back into the atmosphere,
through a sort of breathing, right, by both plants, animals and most bacteria, right?
Animals thinking about humans. We know we take in oxygen. We release out CO2 into the atmosphere.
This process of respiration is how we get our usable energy.
Another example of how carbon gets into
the atmosphere is
going to be combustion.
Combustion is the burning of fossil fuels, things like oil and coal
in different ways like factories, you can see here,
refineries,
transportation, like cars or trains,
electricity.
All those things use fuel,
most of them fossil fuels, and in the process we release CO2 into the atmosphere.
So there's large amounts of CO2 going into the atmosphere through combustion.
Decomposition releases a small amount of CO2 into the atmosphere.
That CO2 is released when plants or animals decay and some of the oxygen allows that CO2 to excape back.
So we see here, we have some organic debris,
some plants, some leaves, apple corer, things like that.
Over time, that stuff will decay into the ground, but we'll also release CO2 back into the atmosphere.
So, you have this picture there on the right-hand side, we want to label some of those processes just mentioned,
on this diagram, and a lot of them are list here already.
We can see respiration listed.
That's when we have the CO2 going from the plants to the atmosphere. So we put a little one in that spot.
We've also got combustion with a two.
CO2 emitted from factories going into the atmosphere and then we also have three, decomposition.
Again, plants releasing some CO2 in the atmosphere.
I did put another three down here because decomposition is also the plants going down into the ground, in soil,
which we'll talk about later.
So back to our diagram we want to label these things on our picture along with the term name.
So the first one we had was respiration.
So want to include some arrows from our little furry friends here going up into the atmosphere.
I'll label that nice and clear with respiration.
We also talked about combustion, burning of fossil fuels releasing carbon into the atmosphere.
And finally, we talked about decomposition.
where we doing all that plants and animals go into the ground and leave behind some CO2 there,
but in this example, we talked about it being released back into the atmosphere.
So decomposition.
And again, all of those are ways carbon goes into the atmosphere so notice all those arrows are pointing in an upward direction,
bringing the carbon back
to the atmosphere.
Additional ways that carbon can get into the atmosphere is through deforestation. See the word forest in there?
This does have to do with trees, cutting them down, burning them up, getting rid of them really quickly.
The burning process of them sends that carbon into the atmosphere.
Diffusion also releases carbon to the atmosphere.
This often happens with upwelling in the ocean, when I have water, warmer water, moving up to the surface,
it comes in contact with part of the atmosphere
lacking carbon and so the atoms can simply transfer themselves up into the atmosphere.
So they're going from a high concentration in the ocean to a low concentration in the air.
Some not as common ways, but carbon is added to the atmosphere through these processes,
volcanic eruptions and the human production of cement.
Okay, again, both of those happen, put CO2 in the atmosphere, but are not quite as common as the others listed.
Let's label our two terms then on our diagram.
The first one is deforestation, you know, by burning and
cutting down the trees, we're releasing additional carbon into the atmosphere and our diffusion is also releasing carbon into the atmosphere
from the water environments. We have two arrows going up towards carbon in the atmosphere.
By the water we have here diffusion
and over here we have deforestation.
Go ahead and pause the video and think about of the five processes that we've discussed so far.
Which ones are totally natural, not changed by humans,
and which ones would be through human actions? And some of them you may find fit best on both examples.
They're natural, but they're a human natural. So think about of those five that we talked about so far.
Which ones would go under which lists?
Our next set of terms then is talking about how the carbon comes out of the atmosphere.
This whole time we've been talking about adding it in, but we are a cycle for a carbon cycle,
so we want to figure out well if the carbon goes in, it's got to come out of the atmosphere.
So photosynthesis is the most common way we see carbon being removed from the atmosphere. We've talked about this before in plants.
Plants absorb solar energy along with CO2 and they do that to make their sugars and their food.
They of course then release oxygen back into the atmosphere, but all the while are taking in more and more CO2.
Two other terms that remove carbon from the atmosphere. We have here diffusion again.
Diffusion actually works both ways. In the case of a time when the ocean water becomes cooler,
end up with a higher
concentration of
carbon in the atmosphere and a lower concentration of
carbonic acid in the ocean.
When that's the case, we end up with the carbon going from the air to the ocean in reverse.
So diffusion can both add carbon to the atmosphere and remove it all around water.
The third one here, calcification,
we're not going to add to our diagram,
but it does occur in the shallow ocean when we have little critters, that have shells on their back.
They can remove that carbonic acid from the water and use it to make their homes.
So adding in a couple more here.
We had photosynthesis takes carbon from the atmosphere and brings it into plants.
As well as diffusion, we talked about going both directions so we can add a second arrow to diffusion,
while labeling our
photosynthesis arrow,
taking carbon from the air into the plants
Finally, not all carbon transfers are going in and out of the atmosphere.
We have some going in and out of other spheres as well, like the biosphere and the geosphere.
Food chain explains how people get their carbon. Similar to the nitrogen cycle,
we have to take our carbon in it, through eating, through the food chain.
Decomposition, we talked about, adds carbon to the atmosphere but also releases carbon into the soil, right?
When plants decay down into the ground part of their organic material, or their carbon, goes down into the ground.
And finally that organic material then left over from plants over millions of years can become a fossil fuel.
Once buried underground, if the conditions are right,
we have heat and pressure that can create those fossil fuels like coal, oil, and natural gas.
So as we add our final examples onto here, we have
decomposition
from the trees going down into the ground. Over time, that can become fossil fuels, which are then burned in the factories.
And then our food chain is also going from the trees to the animals, or from animal to animal.
That's the way that they are getting their carbon because we cannot breathe it in.
Now that we have all key terms on our diagram,
we want to make sure we finish up those last few essential questions at the end of our notes
to show mastery of all of our terms and the carbon cycle.
So these are the last two summary questions that you have going on on the very back of your notes.
The first one is just a simple list where carbon is found in each of the four spheres.
So back to page 1 of the notes, or even looking at your picture, give an example of where carbon can be found
in each of the four spheres.
The third one here.
give a definition of a process within the carbon cycle
stating where the carbon begins and then where the carbon ends.
So I actually gave you one example.
so you've got three total that you need to complete, A, B, and C on there,
so you can pick any
process that was discussed in the notes. Again looking at your picture, thinking about where that arrow begins
and where it ends and give that location in your written definition.
So where does it start
versus where does it end? So the example I used is diffusion.
Seeing that it starts in the atmosphere and is transferred to water. And diffusion actually works both ways.
So I also said vice-versa going from water to the atmosphere.
This picture part is where you're going to draw in just a little snapshot of the carbon cycle.
So for diffusion you would just draw in,
and you can do this on yours, for my example
the water, right?
And then you can draw your arrow going both out from the water to the atmosphere
and you can also draw an arrow from the atmosphere to the water.
So whatever term that you pick, give the written
definition over here
right, and then the picture
definition over here. Just a little snapshot of the carbon cycle.
To complete the assignment then, once you've completed the video and the notes, make sure you go to the assignment and
attach an actual picture of
the notes and
the summary questions to show that you've completed it and make sure that your name gets up there on top
so that we can verify it is in fact your assignment. Thank you.
