Technoscience

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Unit 4 Environmental Science has two areas of study:

(1) Pollution and (2) Environmental Management Systems.

Area of study (1) includes the following:

• What is pollution? (Air, water and soil)
• Sources and sinks, diffuse and point sources
• transport mechanisms including persistence, mobility and bioaccumulation.
• environmental human health, health of the environment and environmental hazards.
• exposure, dosage, chronic and acute toxicity, allergies, specificity and synergistic reactions
• Mercury and Sulphur dioxide will be two of the main pollutants studied.
• We will conduct our case study on flouride, as it has been a major issue in the local media in recent times.
• Check out this interesting article about how pollution has caused ‘reverse evolution’ in Lake Washington

The Environmental Protection Authority  and the CSIRO have great resources for this unit of work.

Unit 3 Environmental Science has two areas of study:

(1) Energy and Global Warming.

(2) Diversity in the Biosphere.

The first school-assessed task for area (1) will be a report linking our five practical experiments to the theory of energy. Knowledge of the first law of thermodynamics (law of conservation of energy – “energy cannot be created or destroyed, only changed from one form to another”) and the second law of thermodynamics (that as energy changes from one form to another, some of it is degraded into ‘lower’ or less useful forms of energy) as well as exothermic and endothermic reactions will be necessary.

During our visit to Ballarat and the Family Services Centre we learnt about how building orientation, window size and placement and materials can influence the energy efficiency of buildings.The second school assessed task is a poster or multi-media presentation comparing a fossil fuel with a non-fossil energy source. We will be comparing gas to geothermal energy. Your poster/Powerpoint needs to include data (diagrams, graphs or tables), pictures, a list of advantages and disadvantages of each energy source and a references section.You need to refer specifically to the proposed Mortlake Gas-fired Power Station, the Birdsville Geothermal Power Station and Portland’s geothermal energy resources.

Some of the finished posters are shown below:

Congratulations on completing term 1’s work – two school-assessed coursework tasks!

Next term we will start studing Biodiversity – Read through Chapter 3 – and keep your eye out in the newspapers for articles about rare and threatened plants and animals.

Our selected threatened species will be the “Orange Bellied parrot” – it is estimated there are less than 300 individuals remaining in the wild!

Image courtesy of http://www.cityparrots.org/wp-content/uploads/2007/09/majparrot_narrowweb__300×4710.jpg