Last week we completed a week-long experiment to help us better understand the process of how fossils are formed, and how we can harvest fossil fuels from existing fossils.
We cut an apple in half and wrapped one of the halves in plastic wrap. Every day we checked our apples and recorded our observations.
The goal was not to see which apple would decay first, but how each apple would decay and how their decomposition is similar to that of organisms that become fossils.
DAY 1
DAY 2
DAY 3
On Day 4 we started to see mold! Ew!
DAY 4
DAY 5
By the end of the week, both apples looked quite different than they had on Monday. The unwrapped apple had really decayed and even shrunk in size. The wrapped apple remained the same size, but started to grow mold due to the moisture trapped by the plastic wrap.
We concluded that the apple wrapped in plastic best exhibited how fossils are formed because fossils are buried underneath many layers of sedimentary rock, which is how they are preserved for so long. Though our wrapped apple was moldy, it really did not decay very much because it was protected from air exposure by the plastic. If organisms from long ago were left exposed to air for so long, (like our uncovered apple) many fossils and fossil fuels wouldn't exist!
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