Just for Fun!

I was on my terrace over the weekend digging around my plants and generally tidying up when I started to wonder if I carried on digging where would I end up, well if you have an overwhelming urge to go Stanley Yelnats and start digging holes here is the website for you!
Just out of interest I would have ended up just off the West Coast of the North Island of New Zealand.

http://map.talleye.com/bighole.php

If manual labour is not for you and you consider yourself more of a thinker then the Earth guide could answer all of those odd questions that keep you awake at night.

http://jvsc.jst.go.jp/earth/guide/english/data/top.html

Like so many people over the weekend I went to the supermarket and I was surprised that even in Supermarkets that charge for carrier bags so many people dont bring their own. I do, because in the UK there is a lot of pressure on people to have reusable shopping bags. So go on persuade your family to reuse, reduce and recycle.

Desertification and Drought

A lot of original and higher level thinking about deserts and the issues involved with their growth and the increase in desertification in not only the Sahel but China and even the USA. The relationship between climate change and the loss of soil fertility and desert growth also provoked quite a lot of debate and interest.
It is interesting to consider how various traditional peoples around the world are coping with the growth of deserts especially in Africa which has been particularly hit hard.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/gallery/2009/sep/07/turkana-kenya-drought-climate-change

This has been especially hard in Kenya where years of successive droughts have badly affected nomadic pastoralists with parched land and the drying up of traditional water holes and reservoirs.



The UN predicts that desertification could displace up to 50 million people from their homes in the next few years and that climate change and increasing desertification could be the greatest environmental challenge faced by man.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/6247802.stm#map

People displaced by desertification put new strains on natural resources and on other societies nearby and threaten international instability.
"There is a chain reaction. It leads to social turmoil," said Zafaar Adeel, head of the UN University's International Network on Water, Environment and Health.The largest area affected was probably sub-Saharan Africa, where people are moving to northern Africa or to Europe, while the second area is the former Soviet republics in central Asia.
The UN report suggests that new farming practices, such as encouraging forests in dryland areas, were simple measures that could remove more carbon from the atmosphere and also prevent the spread of deserts. "It says to dryland dwellers we need to provide alternative livelihoods - not the traditional cropping based on irrigation, cattle farming, etcetera - but rather introduce more innovative livelihoods which don't put pressure on the natural resources," Mr Adeel said. "Things like ecotourism or using solar energy to create other activities." Some countries like China have embarked on tree-planting programmes to stem the advance of deserts. But according to the author, in some cases the trees being planted needed large amounts of water, putting even more pressure on scarce resources.

So it would appear that there is no easy or immediate solution.

http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2009/04/murray-darling/toensing-photography
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2009/04/murray-darling/draper-text
The Murray Darling River Basin in Australia has been particularly hard hit and families are employing some unusual methods to cut their water consumption in half. Families are encouraged to shower together and even shower with feet in large buckets so that the water can then be collected and recycled to flush toilets or water the garden.




We may laugh but the reality is that Portugal has experienced a record number of dry years since 1970 and water availability is an increasingly important issue.

Brazil is offering a solution, try it out, it's good to be green!

Population pyramids

The recent exercise on population pyramid construction was excellent especially the care in which all of year 9 took to make them as precise and as neat as possible. We shall be using all of the data in a forthcoming lesson to do some population calculations and work out dependency ratios, the population growth rate and the doubling time for our countries. Complicated stuff so you will need to bring your calculators.

http://www.ined.fr/en/everything_about_population/animations/fecondity/

This is an excellent website that has a wide range of animated presentations on population pyramids, measuring life expectancy and fertility as well as the global population and the importance of births and family size. It is nice and easy to navigate around and very user friendly.

There are some good visualisations of pyramids in a hundred year period between 1950 and 2050. Looking at how the populations of Europe, China and the USA are predicted to change. puts a lot of the work we have been doing into perspective, and makes it a little easier to understand.

http://www.china-profile.com/data/ani_ceu_pop.htm

We used the powerpoint below in the lesson on population Pyramids, but there were some places that it did get a little bit confusing so just to make sure you fully understand everything here it is again.

Population Pyramids

Ecosystems and Climate

Deserts and Tropical Rainforests all courtesy of the marvelous David Attenborough and the BBC Earth DVD boxed set, an essential resource of the OBS Geography department.
Homework this week is the Deforestation newspaper article and the associated questions, some parts might be quite tricky but are easily handled if you have your text book opened to pages 236-7 and the destruction of the Amazon ecosystem, powerful stuff.
If you have forgotten anything or were absent from the lesson this game based on the Da Vinci Code should help you on your way.

http://www.daversitycode.com

Some work on how we can get cold as well as hot deserts is important in order to understand this vital ecosystem and then after watching the deserts episode of Planet Earth we shall be looking at area of the world that are suffering from desertification and drought.
Mrs Craig has encouraged my interest in the current Australian drought and pages 256-8 in your textbook has an excellent case study on the Sahel region of Africa for desertification and Drought.

Back after the Summer

Back with our noses firmly pressed to the grindstone, the pressure is most certainly on.
Year 9 have an interesting homework where they get to play around on a website and still manage to fit in some serious learning which cant be all bad!

Measuring and Collecting Demographic Data
IGCSE Year 9
Homework Due Tuesday 29th September

http://www.bbc.co.uk/scotland/education/geog/population/activities/dtm_activity.shtml

Follow the link above to complete your homework.
1. In the measuring data page drag and drop the pyramids to their correct places on the Demographic Transition Model.
2. Screen print the completed game and print it. (you can always save onto a memory stick and print at school)
3. Complete the drag and drop flag activity.
4. Go to the collecting Data tab and click on explore the countries.
5. Read through at least two of the countries and the problems they have encountered taking a census.
6. Look at the exam style questions in preparation for an exam style question on Tuesday 29th.