1997-98
NEW MEXICO
HIGH SCHOOL
SUPERCOMPUTING CHALLENGE
TEAM ABSTRACT
083
Navajo Preparatory School
Zoology
Our group became interested in this topic of Zoology at our first meeting with our sponsor. We started off the project by brainstorming major science subject areas such as Zoology, etc. We then looked within the subject of Zoology, looking at major subject areas within this topic heading. We voted upon subjects within Zoology and came up with a few popular subjects, including Ichthyology, Cytology, Paleontology, and Ornithology. We reviewed these topics and gathered information from all the members of the group based upon their interests. We decided to go onto the internet as a group and look at other team abstracts. This course of action did eventually help us by having some examples to look for ideas for our project. We've checked several home pages of universities to see what research was being done in our areas of interest: New Mexico State University and under the Arizona State University homepages would help our group find some sponsors or people who could help our group narrow down our topic. We were planning to meet with a biology instructor to help us narrow our topic or perhaps to look in another area of Zoology.
Our group has decided to model on the supercomputer, a depiction of how a fish or other oceanic creature would become fossilized after being buried beneath a mound of volcanic ash. We will show a scene of a fish swimming along in the ocean waters and becoming buried in volcanic ash during an eruption. We would then model a fish becoming fossilized within the ash after a certain period of time.