Inner Earth and Plate Tectonics...
During Asia Part 2, we travel to the Ring of Fire and Mount Merapi in Indonesia. Before we can understand how volcanoes erupt, we need to understand how they are formed. To understand how they are created you need to look inside the earth...Thus, I made a model of what scientists believe the inner earth looks like ...the inner core is solid nickel/iron with other elements- represented by the glitter rubberball, and the outer core is liquid nickel/iron- represented by soap and glitter in a plastic bag (which you can squish!!!), then the mantle is partially solid rock and lastly is the crust (where we live with land and ocean) which is solid rock. I discuss plate tectonics and how volcanoes form with convergent and divergent plates (shown visually with graham crackers and nutella magma pushing away from each other=divergent plate …or one cracker pushing under the other= convergent plates).This should help us understand how volcanoes form and have a crack in the earth’s crust to erupt through.
