Hi, this is Future Ticia 2025 here, and I’m updating our Ocean Currents experiment post to make it a bit more readable and explain it a little better and just all around make this a bit more of a useful science lesson for people. This was part of our Swimming creatures Unit, but we also redid this later on as part of our Age of Exploration Unit. So, this could be part of a great cross-curriculuar unit. Now I release you back to past Ticia 2011.
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We’ve started our next science book, Exploring Creation with Zoology 2: Swimming Creatures. Or as my kid calls it “The Ocean science book.”
The first chapter is basically sets up what the ocean is like. So, we first read about plankton, and many other things, and then we got to currents, and I remembered All Things Beautiful having a wonderful ocean currents experiment and all sorts of things (she has older kids, so she went into a lot more detail, and sadly she has deleted all of the posts, so I have removed the links).
What you need for this ocean currents experiment
9 x 13 clear glass dish (it needs to be clear so you can see what is happening), liquid food dye, various small land forms (you can see we used random dishes), plastic straws, ice cubes
How does water temperature affect ocean currents?
So, we happily set up our ocean currents and our oh so official land masses for our experiment.
Here are my kid’s observations:
Basically, to give a bit of science to that, the cold water causes the water to move around.
Now, he is exploring how this works with air, but you can see very dramatically what happened with the blue ice cube and the red hot water bottle, and you saw in the video what happened when the ice cube was added into our room temperature water how the colors moved towards it.
It changes how the waters act.
How does wind affect the ocean currents?
And after talking about that for a little while, we did the next step of our ocean currents experiment.
Blowing on it, to simulate wind and other surface events that affect the oceans. It was hilarious seeing them blow it all over and their amazement at the colors mixing. Then we talked about how someone in the United States could drop trash in the ocean and how that could affect someone in Africa.
In our science book, there was a hilarious example about a boat carrying Nike shoes that sank in the Atlantic Ocean Gyre. Scientists were rubbing their hands in glee as they theorized what would happen to the shoes, and they got to watch as the shoes moved exactly where they predicted.
Of course, they didn’t really say how it got cleaned up, but it was a great example of how something that is dropped in one place can affect other parts of the world.
How do ocean currents react to land masses?
Now, I have no pictures for this, and I actually didn’t write this down initially, but part of the point of this is to discuss how land masses affect ocean currents.
As you blow your winds or add in the ice cubes or hot water, oh man, that could be an interesting thing to add, some hot water and see what happens. How does that change how the water moves?
I think it would be interesting to repeat this experiment with different land masses. How is this different if you have one big land mass versus several smaller land masses?
So many interesting things to observe.
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