Monthly Archives: March 2014
40.WHAT IS THE ATMOSPHERE OF THE EARTH?
As we read about man’s plans to explore the moon and other planets, we often come across the question of an atmosphere. Do other planets have an atmosphere, too?
As far as scientists know, there is no other planet or star that has an atmosphere like ours. What is atmosphere? We can think of it as a great ocean of air that surrounds the earth and that extends up for hundreds of miles.
39.WHAT IS OCEANOGRAPHY?
If you take practically anything that exists in nature, the chances are that there is also a special science to study it. Oceanography is the study of all the sciences connected with the ocean to help man understand how the ocean was formed and how changes take place in it.
As you might imagine, this takes quite a bit of studying! Let’s see what it includes. Well, we can begin with the shoreline itself. The seacoast, the borderline between land and sea, is always changing due to tides, storms, everyday action of the sea against the shore, and upward and downward movements of the land.
38.WHAT IS AN ARTESIAN WELL?
In an artesian well, the water can leap high into the air like a geyser from its prison far below the surface of the earth. The name comes from the Artois region in northern France where the first European well of this kind was drilled more than 800 years ago.
Artesian wells are possible only under certain conditions. There must be a layer of porous rock or sand that is buried between two layers of solid rock impervious to water. Somewhere this porous layer must be exposed to the surface so that water falling as rain or snow will sink downward until it is trapped between the solid, watertight layers above and below.
