Seabury Pioneers: Thinking About Continental Drift

Last week we learned about plate tectonics and the Continental Drift theory. We always like to start with a question, and this time, it was "What of the continents had not drifted apart?"

Here were some of our *truly* original answers:

"Animals would be scattered instead of in one place. Animals would not be the same (as they are now) and we might be gorillas still."

"If the continents had not drifted apart, people would not have airplanes."

"People would all have the same culture. It would be boring because you can't go to tropical islands."

"There would be a catastrophic explosion because the magnetic waves would would break through the core. It would also also start going in a ultra-fast tiny circle because the core would be attracted to the crust, and the world would turn into a black hole."

"I think they would all have the same culture, and people wouldn't be able to travel anywhere because it would all be like one big country. Also, there would be too much water (everywhere else)."

"The map would look different, and earth would look different from space."

We went on to learn about the fossil records that support Alfred Wegener's theory of Continental Drift, and after "puzzling" out our own theories of how the continents fit together, we learned about how the plates shift and move. Here we are experimenting with and modeling these forces for ourselves:

Subduction sandwich, anyone?

Finally, we watched a mind-expanding video on what life might be like 100,000,000 years from now:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oBcHf_eeYt4

Which inspired one student to write a book in Literacy;