Don’t Try This at Home
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Audience: Grades 9-12

National Science Education Content Standards:
Standard A: Science as Inquiry
Standard B: Physical Science

Keywords: chemistry, gas hydrates, methane, gas laws

Description

Don't Try This at Home is an inquiry-based activity focusing on methane hydrates. This activity helps teachers foster a class-wide discussion to form a question and hypothesis and design an experiment to discover what methane hydrates are and how they relate to the gas laws.

Supplemental Resources

Flaming Hydrate image (jpg: 60KB) (image courtesy Dr. Gary Klinkhammer, Oregon State Univ.)

Methane Hydrate Drilling Video - (QuickTime: 18MB) this video was shot on the JOIDES Resolution on Leg 204 of the Ocean Drilling Program. The video shows the ship’s drillers preparing to safely extract the methane hydrate core from the drill pipe. The sediment containing the methane hydrate can be seen rapidly shooting out of the drill pipe, showing the volatility of methane hydrate from below the seafloor. This video is referred to in the Don't Try This at Home activity.

Credits
Written by Leslie Peart (5/2005)

For more information about any of our educational resources please contact deepearthacademy@oceanleadership.org.