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 Article:
No Littering O-Zone: How Rising Ozone Levels Affect Tree GrowthThis article is from Issue Northern States Edition - Vol. 1 No. 1.
* Note: All editions of the Natural Inquirer starting with Volume 5 and including future editions require the newest version of Adobe Acrobat Reader 6.0 in order to be downloaded. We have upgraded in order to ensure greater accessibility to PDF files. Please click on the following link if you need to upgrade your Adobe Acrobat reader: Upgrade now to Adobe Reader 6.0. It is a free upgrade. Meet the scientists that contributed to this article:"Science Topics" covered in this article:
"Environmental Topics" covered in this article:
Regions covered in this article:
"Thinking About Science Themes" covered in this article: Scientists want to discover the correct information about our world. To do this, they often set up experiments. They want these experiments to be as close to the real world as possible. In this study, the scientists wanted to know how increasing the amount of ozone (o zon) might affect some types of trees. You will learn about ozone in the next section. One way to find out how ozone affects trees might be to put potted trees into a room. Then the scientists could increase the amount of ozone in the room. Does this seem like the real world to you? It did not seem that way to the scientists either! Instead, the scientists planted trees outside in a special area. They constructed towers that released ozone into the wind. The wind carried the ozone to the trees. This allowed scientists to observe how the trees respond to ozone in a more natural environment. Specific "Thinking About Science" Themes:"Thinking About Environmental Themes" covered in this article: Have you heard about the chemical ozone? Ozone is a gas that contains oxygen. Ozone is found in the atmosphere. Sometimes ozone can be helpful and sometimes it is harmful. The atmosphere has different layers (figure 1). The troposphere (trop o sfer) is the layer of atmosphere closest to Earth (figure 2). When ozone is found in the troposphere, it is harmful. Ozone is the main ingredient of smog (smawg). Smog is polluted air and is a danger to human health. Ozone is also found in the stratosphere (strat o sfer). The stratosphere is a higher level of the atmosphere (see figure 1). In the stratosphere, ozone provides a layer of protection from the sun’s harmful rays. This example shows how ozone can also be helpful. You can see that ozone can both protect and harm life on Earth. Humans can create more ozone. For example, fossil fuels (fôs ul fyools) are fuels that are formed from the remains of animals from the past (figure 3). Gasoline is an example of a fossil fuel. When people burn fossil fuels, the amount of ozone in the troposphere rises. The increase in ozone impacts humans as well as other living things. The scientists in this study wanted to know how trees might be affected by rising levels of ozone in the troposphere. Specific "Thinking About the Environment" Themes:Forest Service Stations covered in this article:
NSE Standards covered in this article:
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