Carbon Cycle Inquiry Lab | Plate Tectonics & Earth's Cooling

The Description

The carbon cycle can look wonderfully organized on paper: arrows here, reservoirs there, everyone feeling good. Then ask what plate tectonics has to do with the whole system, and those neat arrows start looking a lot less convincing.

In this three-day geoscience mission, students investigate a hypothetical problem: what might happen to Earth's long-term carbon cycle if cooling inside the planet slowed plate movement? They use carbon-cycle models and evidence to connect processes deep underground to reservoirs, climate, and life at the surface.

What Students Will Do

• Track carbon among the atmosphere, oceans, rocks, and living things.

• Build a model showing carbon reservoirs, transfers, and geologic processes.

• Predict how changes in plate motion might affect long-term carbon cycling.

• Use their models to explain possible climate consequences.

• Communicate conclusions in a final geoscience mission report.

Why This Resource Is Different

I wanted students to see that carbon cycling is not just a collection of arrows worth memorizing. When they have to account for the geosphere, the story gets bigger—and the reasoning gets more interesting.

The cooling-Earth scenario is intentionally hypothetical, not a claim that plate tectonics is stopping. It makes students use a connected Earth-systems model to defend predictions instead of repeating isolated facts.

What's Included?

• Three-day mission-based student investigation.

• Carbon-cycle models and diagram-building tasks.

• Analysis questions and hypothetical prediction challenge.

• Final geoscience mission report.

• Teacher answer key.

The Details

Grades 8–11; approximately three class periods. Earth Science/Earth & Space Science.

NGSS connections: HS-ESS2-3 and HS-ESS2-6. Printable investigation; cooling-Earth premise is a teaching scenario.