Download Snack Tectonics

Snack Tectonics
Students use graham crackers and frosting to learn about the different
aspects of plate tectonics. They manipulate the graham crackers in various
ways to model divergent plate boundaries, convergent plate boundaries continental and oceanic, convergent plate boundaries - continental, and
lateral plate boundaries. Students observe what happens to the graham
crackers and frosting and discuss their findings.
Below is a description of the activity from
http://www.mbmg.mtech.edu/kids/shakin.htm
What you'll need:
Graham crackers
Waxed paper spread with a thick layer of frosting or peanut butter.
Milk (To drink with the crackers after finishing the experiments.)
A crack in the earth's crust is called a fault. The large crack where two huge earth plates move
against each other is a fault line. Fault lines are where the action happens.
Put two graham crackers side by side, and slide one up away from
you and the other one down toward you.
When plates move past each other like this, things don't exactly go
smoothly. In fact, the plates usually get stuck on each other and
then give a lurch and move on, sending waves of vibrations
through the earth's interior (much like the circular waves that ripple
out when you drop a pebble in the water). These vibrations are so
powerful that we have a special name for them— earthquake!
Whose fault is this?
What if you went outside after an earthquake and found the raspberries
your family planted in the front yard were growing in front of your next
door neighbor's house (and in your yard were the roses from the next
house)? This is what happened in San Francisco along one of the most
famous fault lines in the world— the San Andreas Fault in California, a
600 -mile boundary where the American and Pacific Plates meet. In
1906, there was an earthquake along this fault line and the earth moved
about 20 feet in less than a minute! Wonder who got to eat the ripe
berries?
Put two graham crackers very close to each other on the wax paper and
slowly push them together.
You've made a rift, or big crack in the ocean floor. As the plates
separate, magma oozes up from below and makes new ocean floor or
creates underwater mountain ranges.
Push two crackers toward each other, make one slide underneath
the other.
When this happens on earth, watch out! The bottom plate starts to
melt from the intense heat and pressure. It becomes new magma
that floats up between two plates, building up and up over many
years until it finally causes a volcano blast! That plate action
caused Mt. St. Helens in Washington State to blow its top!
Put two graham crackers side by side on the wax paper (wet the edge
of one graham cracker in milk first), and slowly push them together.
The ridge of pushed -up cracker is just like many mountain ranges
around the earth that were formed as two plates slowly crumbled
together over millions of years. The Himalayas ( the mountain range
that includes Mount Everest) were formed when India crashed into
Asia.