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| The world looks different through a microscope... the photographs above show two materials that appear to have different structures - the photograph on the left is a special rock that is formed in some lava fountains in Hawaii (it's called reticulite and will be the subject of a blog post); the photograph on the left is a thin slice of popcorn. |
Because it's fun and familiar! For example, in the photographs above, you can see that, under the microscope, a special Hawaiian rock called reticulite looks a lot like popcorn (although the scale is different). In fact, although the processes that form the two materials are not identical, there are enough similarities that studying popcorn helps us to understand reticulite - we'll write about this in the blog.
More generally, many of the processes that make popcorn pop, cakes rise, candy solidify, and champagne bubble are similar to processes that make volcanoes erupt. In this way, food acts as an easy-to-study analog (analogy) for the volcanic process. According to Wikipedia (the source of all knowledge!), analogies relate one particular to another particular; analog models, then, relate one system to another, more accessible system. We started experimenting with food as a teaching device - a way to help students understand volcanic processes. However, our experimentation with familiar materials encountered in the kitchen has given us new intuition about some volcanic processes.
However, we have to be careful to choose proper analogs. An excellent example of a bad analog model is the baking soda and vinegar volcano that is commonly used in elementary school. The problem is that the ‘eruption’ mechanism bears no relationship to real volcanic eruptions, and therefore no real insight is gained into eruptive processes[1].
In our posts, we will not only describe the similarities between the food analog that we are using but we will also discuss the limitations of using that analog to understand a specific volcanic process.
[1] Kastens and Rivet (2010) Using Analogical Mapping to Assess the Affordance of Scale Models used in Earth & Environmental Science Education.
