Blog Post #3: Favorite Peer Projects

My favorite peer projects were probably the Stone Forest, You are Warned: You Will be Warmed, and the Aurora Borealis projects. The Stone Forest project interested me due to it's sheer beauty, it's a marvelous landscape that is commonly projected in depictions of "old" China. I would love to visit that place and climb the stones and hike through the forests. I also learned a lot from this project, including the myth of the forest and the fact that it's mostly a giant sheet of limestone rock that has been eroded away. I never would've known these things and the project actually taught me something interesting. The project, You are Warned: You Will be Warmed, was another one of my favorites mostly due to the title, very clever. But it also brought to the table the dangers of global warming and greenhouse gases. Global warming is a very real threat to not only us but to other wildlife as well as the planet as a whole. I very much liked that they included animals that are being affected by the issue of global warming; such as polar bears who live off the ice and no longer can do that due to the melting of the polar ice caps. Lastly, I liked the Aurora Borealis project for most of the same reasons i liked the Stone Forest project. The "Northern Lights" are a beauty to behold and I would love to see them in person one day. They are also somewhat of a mystery to me, before their presentation I had a faint idea of what caused them (something to do with temperature or ionization of the air) but their project taught me that and more. Such as, that there is more than one type of this spectacle that happens in the Southern hemisphere (Aurora Austrialis). I also learned that different gases at different temperatures is what actually causes the lights to change color.

Blog Post #2: Canyon Lake Gorge Field Trip

The field trip to Canyon Lake Gorge was a very interesting and exciting, fun field trip. Honestly, I've loved dinosaurs and prehistoric life since I was little (I remember receiving a dinosaur encyclopedia for Christmas and it wasn't one of those basic kid ones either), so the trip was fun. Searching for small prehistoric fossils like the fossilized sea urchins, gastropods, and other shells and ancient sea critters was fun. Some of the stuff, if not most, I had already known- such as the fact that prehistoric sauropods walked like an elephant, leaving figure eight style foot prints due to their round feet. I also knew that carnivores had a 3 toed- very bird like foot print and moved in a weird swaying motion. One thing I found very interesting was the fact that scientists, paleontologists, today have found a way to find patterns in the rock using high powered microscopes and are now able to tell fossilized colors and that they have already figured out that dinosaurs were very colorful. I never knew that was even possible and when I heard it, it just blew my mind. I also thought the landscape was beautiful, I loved the small series of waterfalls where ferns were growing, that was spectacular. I wanted to just climb around and have fun wandering off wherever and exploring the landscape.