Riccardo's Science Blog

Summary The Amazon river is the second longest river in the world, only being surpassed by the Nile. It is around 4,000 miles long and goes through countries such as  Bolivia, Guyana, Ecuador, Venezuela, Brazil, Colombia and Peru. The Amazon river mostly runs through jungle, meaning that people did not alter the course of the river in many areas. There are a lot of tribes around the river that use the it as a sources of water. Many of the people in this region have a belief called animism. They believe that every living thing has a soul. There are a lot of minerals and plants in or around the Amazon river that make it popular with investors. The Amazon river is threatened by factories and logging done by people. In Ecuador they are especially threatened by the oil industry in that area.  Backward-Looking I knew a lot about rivers already. I had studied them many times in previous grades. Now the Amazon river I did not know much about. The only thing I knew about the

China Should not build Hydroelectric dams. After 18 long years of construction, the 3 gorges dam was completed in 2012 on July 4th. It took over 30 million dollars to build. The dam was an attempt by China to go green, but many people inside and outside of China think if it was really worth it. Although the 3 gorges dam has produced a lot of clean electricity, its consequences outweigh the benefits. On of the reasons the dam was built was to reduce the risk of flooding, but it also increased the risk of landslides by 70 percent. China wants to build 4 more dams along the Jinsha River; a river flowing into the Yangtze River. This would cause even more problems. The three gorges dam alone has damaged the ecosystem, affected peoples' lives, and caused the landscape to change. With four more, the dams would be disaster areas. The building of the dam also affected people. Hundreds of thousands of people were forced to relocate. One of the few costs that the dam has caused was that t

Summary; Rivers can take a long time to form. Many different things can affect the way a river forms. Some of these things include glaciers and dams. These two things either add water or block water. This can either be good for the river or bad. Building dams can be very risky because it is holding up so much water. If not build correctly, the dam could send a lot of water inland, corrupting the river and it would have to much water. Glaciers on the other hand can help speed up the erosion process because they add more water to the river. But if to much erosion happens to much sediment is brought down filling parts of the river with to much sediment. Rivers are very important resources to humans and other living things. They provide water and a home for other animals. Without rivers, we would not be able to be the advanced species we are today. SP2: Developing and using models: We used models of rivers to simulate how a river was formed. We performed multiple experiments to sim