Part A: Think about it (Independent)

Thinking Questions: Annotate the Text

1. What is thermal energy? How do we 1. Highlight, circle or underline important

measure it? information.

2. Write your comments and questions in the

margin.

3. Use symbols to mark the text

2. Explain the second law of thermodynamics ! This is interesting
in your own words. What is entropy? ? This is confusing

Criteria for success: A level 4 will do all of

the following:
3. Are earthquakes and volcanoes caused by
increasing entropy? How?
4. Are entropy and complexity of a system
always the same?
Annotations are found throughout the
reading, equaling about 1 per
paragraph.
Keywords AND ideas are highlighted.
Additional questions/interactions with
the text are written.
Any responses are written neatly & in
complete sentences, is detailed and is
written in own words.

What is Entropy?
Entropy is a measure of how much the atoms in a substance are free to spread out, move
around, and arrange themselves in random ways. For instance, when a substance changes from
a solid to a liquid, such as ice to water, the atoms in the substance get more freedom to move
around. You can see this by the way that water can slosh around, but ice is a solid object.
Because those atoms have more freedom, they're more likely to be randomly arranged. And so,
we can say that water has higher entropy than ice.
So, when there is higher entropy, there is greater freedom for atoms to move around. And the
more energy we have, the more atoms move around and spread into a random arrangement.

More on Thermodynamics
Entropy plays a large role in the second law of thermodynamics, which says that atoms tend to
become more free and randomly arranged, so that throughout the universe, the level of entropy
is rising at a steady rate.

With this law also comes the idea that thermal energy moves from hotter to colder areas as a
way of spreading out the heat, but it doesn't flow in the opposite direction (from colder to
hotter). Think about when you put a pan on the stove--the heat spreads throughout the pan
evenly, even though only a small part of the pan is touching the flame. When you turn the stove
off, the heat in the pan doesn't just flow back into the stove; it keeps moving to the colder areas--
into the air around it.

Seismic waves originate from sites where excess strain energy has built up in the crust due to the
motion of tectonic plates. This energy is transformed into surface and body waves which carry
energy outwards to all parts of the solid Earth.

The essential nature of a wave is that waves move energy across long distances, while matter
moves back and forth or around in a circle within a relatively small area or volume. Tsunami are
another mechanism to disperse the energy that had been concentrated in the small area of a
fault rupture and spread around the world's oceans. This follows the second law, as we can see
an overall increase in entropy throughout the process of seismic upheavals.

Earthquakes and volcanoes, are caused by plate tectonics. But what exactly is Plate Tectonics?
Let us take a look at the process.

Tectonic plates of the Earth.

Credit: USGS

From the deepest ocean trench to the tallest mountain, plate tectonics explains the features and
movement of Earth's surface in the present and the past.

Plate tectonics is the theory that Earth's outer shell is divided into several plates that glide over
the mantle, the rocky inner layer above the core. The plates act like a hard and rigid shell
compared to Earth's mantle. This strong outer layer is called the lithosphere.

Developed from the 1950s through the 1970s, plate tectonics is the modern version of
continental drift, a theory first proposed by scientist Alfred Wegener in 1912. Wegener didn't
have an explanation for how continents could move around the planet, but researchers do now.
Plate tectonics is the unifying theory of geology, said Nicholas van der Elst, a seismologist at
Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, New York.
The diagram shows a simplifed representation of the earths layers. As the layers naturally move
from a state of order to disorder energy is released. This energy can be expressed in the form of
earthquakes on the surface. Another way to look at it would be to think about the extreme heat
in the earths interior and how that energy moves from the higher thermal energy level to the
relatively much lower thermal energy level of the earths surface.

Watch Video on Entropy. Note down observations and questions.

Observations Questions

Part B: Share What You Learned with your lab partner

Your prepped responses: Your partners responses:

Entropy is Entropy is
Entropy plays a role in earthquakes because Entropy plays a role in earthquakes because

Part C: Apply what you learned to a real life scenario

Describe if entropy increases or decreases in the following cases. Do all the processes adhere to
the First and Second Law of Thermodynamics? Explain.

Case study Your explanation

1. Ethanol is heated from a solid state to

a gaseous state. The heating curve
 looks like this:

2. When sugar dissolves into a glass of

water

3. Burning wood in a campfire

4. Making popcorn