How do ocean currents move and how does this affect navigation?

One of the weird random facts I learned about Benjamin Franklin is he learned how the ocean currents move, and charted the Atlantic Current.  If Benjamin Franklin is ever the subject on Jeopardy, I’m set.  Since that’s not likely to happen, I set the kids to an ocean currents experiment and had lots of fun learning about them for our homeschool science that particular day.

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Supplies needed for our ocean currents experiment

9×13 Pyrex dish* (I think I use this more for homeschool lessons than I do for cooking), food coloring* (from the same box as I mentioned yesterday), straws (all of them on Amazon are horrible price, buy them at your grocery store), water, a couple of big rocks or something else that can get wet (so not your electronics), and some ice cubes

How to do your ocean currents experiment

Again my activity is inspired by Phyllis over at All Things Beautiful.  This particular time, it’s her Ocean temperature and wind experiment.  Though I’m wishing we had done her salinity currents experiment as well.

Since she did such a great job talking about how she set it up, and all of that, I’ll concentrate on what we learned.  This is our set-up.  You’ll notice we have two big land masses, and we have 4 separate water masses shown by the different colors.

One of the first steps is to put an ice cube in one corner.  We observed that for a few minutes, and then followed it up with putting a few more ice cubes in.  With each new ice cube the water moved as the ice cube melted, causing the colors to mix.  It was really quite pretty to observe, and the kids had some rather colorful observations.

We moved to the wind (blowing through the straw) observations a little later than we should have, so our colors were already muddied by our earlier observations.  I suppose we could have gotten new water and items, but that didn’t occur to me until I wrote this just now.  As we blew on the water, the colors mixed still more, and we noticed a few more things.

1. While the wind appears to move the surface level of the water, it does not move the whole of the water.
2. Water seems to move much more when affected by temperature, than by the wind.
3. It also got me thinking about how things move around the world, like a message in a bottle, how far would it get?

Again, Phyllis has many more suggestions, and observations, but this is what we have learned from our experiment (she also has some interesting suggestions for simulating the trash thrown in the ocean).

Tomorrow we start on Marco Polo, because this post on ocean currents finishes off our Life of a Sailor Unit.