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Lost Creek and Blue Hole Spring

Grade 6 earth science: a dye test, spring flow after a storm and sun-and-shade pans on a geology trip show how gravity and sunlight move water.

Grade 6ScienceInteractive · Printable

Aligned toMS-ESS2-4

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What’s included

Single worksheet
Auto-graded online
1 NGSS standard
Printable answer key
10 questions
Classroom-ready

Details

Format: Interactive · Printable
Grade: Grade 6
Subject: Science
Question types: Fill in the blank, Multiple choice, Matching, Circle the answer, Short answer

About this worksheet

What students practice

Students use dye test and spring flow data to explain how gravity moves water through the ground.
Students use evaporation data to explain the role of sunlight in the water cycle.
Students model the path of water from a stream into rock, out of a spring and back to the air.

How to use

Sketch the ridge, the sinkhole and the two springs on the board with their heights before students read. Students can label the sketch with arrows after question 8.

Curriculum

NGSS standard covered

MS-ESS2-4

Model how water cycles through Earth's systems, driven by sunlight and gravity.

Preview

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Name Date

Lost Creek and Blue Hole Spring

Use a dye test and spring data to model water moving through rock.

The dye test

Read the passage and study Table 1. Then answer questions 1 and 2.

The Creek That Disappears

1Each October, Mr. Bram Ekstrand’s sixth graders at Fairhaven Middle School take a geology field trip to Gray Ridge to collect rocks and look for fossil shells. Gray Ridge is made of limestone, a rock that often forms from the shells of ancient sea animals. The ridge and the numbers here are made up, but they are based on real limestone regions. This year, Signe Varela helped their guide, geologist Dr. Mirela Constantin, collect data.

2Over many thousands of years, water has slowly widened cracks in the limestone into channels. On top of the ridge, a small stream called Lost Creek flows across a meadow and pours into a sinkhole, a hole in the ground. Then the creek is gone. At the foot of the ridge, 4 km from the sinkhole and 60 m lower, Blue Hole Spring flows out of the rock into a clear pool and feeds the Fair River, which runs to the ocean. Cedar Seep is a smaller spring only 2 km from the sinkhole, but it is 20 m higher than the sinkhole.

3Last year, a team of water scientists poured a harmless green dye into the sinkhole on Day 0. They took water samples from both springs twice a day for 10 days and measured the dye in parts per billion (ppb).

4Dr. Constantin also measures how much water flows out of Blue Hole Spring, in liters per second (L/s). The flow is lowest in long dry spells, but it does not stop. On the field trip, a storm dropped 45 mm of rain on the ridge on Day 0, and then no rain fell for 20 days.

5Signe set out two identical pans, each filled with 2 cm of water from the spring pool. She put one in full sun on a rock by the pool and one in deep shade under a rock overhang a few meters away. After 6 hours on a sunny afternoon, the water in the sunny pan had dropped 4 mm, and the water in the shaded pan had dropped 1 mm.