Day 18 & 19

Terraforming

Would it be possible to live on another planet or moon?

-Colonizing an inhabitable place would require large amounts of supplies. These supplies would have to be constantly brought in if the colony did not have any resources to make its own.

-Terraforming is the process of forming a planet or moon to replicate the biosphere on earth. This requires creating an Ozone layer, releasing CO2 and growing large amounts of photosynthetic organisms to create the oxygen we need.

Here is a video on terraforming Mars

Ecosystems are complex things that usually depend on many organisms that we dont relate. An example is sharks having an impact on the amount of oxygen on earth. This seems like a strange correlation.

-The majority of our oxygen comes from photosynthetic organisms in the ocean, fish eat these organisms and sharks eat them. When the number of sharks goes down the number of fish goes up and they eat more photosynthetic organisms. As the shark population decreases so does our oxygen. These types of correlations are what make ecosystems so complex.

We will now watch the video "Shark Water"

Keystone species- a keystone species is one that if it were to die many other species would also die because they depend on it for their ecosystem.

Your homework is to find a keystone species and explain why its ecosystem depends on it.