Current Event #2

East Coast Blizzard seen from space?!

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/NaturalHazards/view.php?id=41979&src=eorss-nh

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/12/east-coast-blizzard-from-space?npu=1&mbid=yhp

The snowstorm that was so big, was even seen from space. That enourmous blizzard shut down the federal government, travelers, left many people without electricity, and more.

They took this picture from Washing D.C. on with their MODIS instrument. (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) They say the storm was a Nor'easter, which is a powerful storm by a strong low-pressure that forms in the Gulf of Mexico or the Atlantic Ocean and it moves up north in the east. I thought this was very interesting and it caught my eye because I didn't know the storm was that strong that you could see it from space! I learned what a Nor'easter was. When I was first reading that article and I saw that word, I was like what the heck is that? But then I read about it and it was very interesting.

Current Event

The current event I chose was about the mystery of snowflake shapes. http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/50770/title/FOR_KIDS_Scientists_explain_mystery_of_triangular_snowflakes_
A scientist named Kenneth Libbrecht was trying to experiment the shape of snoThatwflakes. Researches found that usually snowflakes are in a shape of a hexagon, but they can be triangular as well. In the lab, Hannah Arnold and Kenneth Libbrecht worked in the lab trying to figure out the snowflake shape. Was it a hexagon, or a triangle? They built a fake snowflake and compared them with actual snowflakes and saw that they were hexagons, but then they started to notice flakes that looked like triangles. They thought that maybe triangular snowflakes aren't so rare! Snowflakes aren't only about seeing in winter, they include math and science by learning how snowflakes move in the air. That is called aerodynamics. I thought this was a very interesting topic because I don't really pay attention to the shape of the snowflake, but how beautiful they look!