Aims, Background and Hypothesis

The aims of this experiment were to determine the specific heat and the rate of heating of a soil sample and then comparing that to those of water. Specific heat is the heat needed to change the temperature of one gram of the substance one degree Celsius. With our findings, we will relate the specific heat findings to climatic phenomena. Land masses heat up and cool down faster than large bodies of water means that variation in temperature between summer and winter will be far greater over continental interiors than along the coastal margins of continents. Having done extensive research on climatic phenomena, we hypothesize that the water will have a greater specific heat than soil, meaning that after the 10 minutes of data collection, the soil sample's temperature will have increased more.