<aside> 🌦️ Hello Ecowarriors! Today’s topic is the water and carbon cycle. You’ll learn about how water and carbon move through nature!
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Hey guys! My name is Cass the Carbon Atom, and I am going to show you around the processes and places I go through! To begin, let me properly introduce myself.
I am incredibly tiny, so tiny the naked eye can’t even see me! Carbon is a chemical element, like the oxygen in the air or the helium in balloons. Carbon is special because it’s the element that makes living things possible!
My buddy here is Wesley the Water Molecule. He’s one of the tiny bundles of atoms that make up the water we drink!
My adventure as a carbon atom starts in your lungs, floating around waiting to be let out. You may have heard that you breathe in oxygen and breathe out carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide has carbon in it! When you breathe out, you send lots of me and my family of carbon atoms out into the atmosphere.
Other things can release carbon, too, like burning fuel in a car.
After floating around in the air for a bit, we head to my good friend Sasha the Sunflower. Unlike humans, Sasha gets her energy and food from the sun. Remember those producers we learned about last week?
Well, plants need carbon to help them get that food, so Sasha takes me and my family in from the air! Sasha then holds onto us, storing us in her leaves, pedals, and stem in a form called glucose. What’s glucose, you ask? It’s sugar!
That’s right, sugar is made out of carbon!
Sometimes, people or animals will eat the plants that hold onto us and turn that sugar back into food for their muscles. In that case, the people send the carbon they eat back out into the world by breathing out. It’s a full cycle!
Sometimes, though, the plants die and get buried before they get eaten. Then me and my friends are released into the soil through a process called decomposition.
Well, now that I’m down in the ground, I think it’s time to let Westly take over the tour.
Hey everyone! As you know, I’m Wesley the Water Molecule, and it’s my turn to show you around the water cycle! Right now we’re in a lake filled with many organisms and populations, but the most important at the moment is the water.
In a bit, the other water molecules and I are going to evaporate (go from a liquid into vapor/gas) and rise into the atmosphere.