CAUTION; Science experiment in progress!

This was one of our favorite labs in class. With the advent of the new NGSS Science Standards, models were shifted from static to dynamic, meaning they needed to model a process or function rather than a single slice in time, such as a stationary cell model. This model represents a batholith and I used this model in preparation for our annual trip to Yosemite for a week with 7th graders. A batholith is a large (at least 40 miles across) underground volume of semi-liquid igneous rock that rises, due to temperature differences, into the Crustal layer of the Earth but does not erupt onto the surface. The word batholith comes from the Greek bath or "deep" and lith or "rock". In the model, the hot plate represents the internal heat of the mantle, the red wax represents the igneous batholith, the sand represents the lower Crust and the water represents the upper Crust. The model also represents well the process of pluton formation: many pulses of igneous rock intrusion which combine to form a batholith. The Yosemite batholith; Half Dome, El Capitan, and most of the other rocks in the park, is part of the Sierra Nevada batholith and rose up into the Crust during the Jurassic and Cretaceous Periods, 120-85 million years ago. It was later exposed by erosion. Interestingly, a geologic map of the face of El Capitan wasn't created until 2011-2013 when a multidisciplinary team created the first map. For more information refer to this link: https://www.nps.gov/yose/learn/nature/granite.htm #batholith, #Yosemite, #geology, #scienceteaching, #middleschool, #pluton, #tectonics, #California, #experiment, #modeling, #NGSS, @pacificpaleontology