A Change in the Weather: Summary

The topic/problem that I wanted to discuss is how geological changes to the earth have altered the climate. Every day earth’s continental plates move and change therefore giving way to different geological adjustments. Some of these changes in turn modify our climate and eventually affect our weather patterns as well. This is important because we can see how our earth and climate system reacts to geological changes and document how it happened and be able to theorize what will happen in similar future events. Being able to realize how our climate system changes allows up to try and predict what will happen next and where we go from there.

As discussed in class on Friday, many changes to our physical earth result in changes to our climatic system. For example, erupting volcanoes can warm up or cool down our climate depending on the type of volcanic activity occurring. Stratovolcanoes, or the volcanoes that are explosive and erupt ash particles and sulfur gases, cool our climate down. This is because of the particles and gases block a portion of our sunlight and radiation from reaching the earth’s surface thus cooling our global climate. In comparison, shield volcanoes are non-explosive volcanoes that simply have molten lava flowing from it along with carbon dioxide gases. These types of volcanoes can heat our climate up because the extra carbon dioxide released into our atmosphere traps some of the radiation from the sun from escaping out. The extra radiation trapped in our atmosphere is what causes an increase in climatic temperature globally. Other geological changes and alterations in our tectonic plates can also affect our climate. Everyday our earth is changing in many ways and behaving from those changes. I think that without the knowledge we have today of how geological features and their changes affect our climate, we would be lacking a very important part to our understanding of the world today. It is crucial for us to continue to document and take...