♪
Welcome to Plum Landing.
"Build a Watershed."
We're on a mission for Plum.
We're going to find out where water goes when it rains.
I'm Ella, and today we're at my house
with Jordan, Nathan and my mom, Christy.
We're going to make a model of a watershed.
A watershed is an area of land that collects water,
which comes from rain or melted snow,
and delivers it to places like a lake or the ocean.
All right, let's build.
We're going to build a model watershed
out of recycled materials,
trays, towels and sheets of plastic
to see how water flows
and how it carries things like pollution.
Pollutants are things we put in the environment,
like trash or chemicals, that are harmful to living things.
This is Mount Jordan.
This is Mount Ella.
Behold Mount Nathan.
We built our mountains and we're now covering them with towels.
We're using towels so that it looks more like a mountain
instead of an upside-downcontainer.
The last step is to put a sheet of plastic over our mountains.
Now that our watershed is built, we're going to see what happens
when we make it rain on our polluted mountains.
These are our mountains that we're going to put glitter,
food coloring and bits of torn-up paper to make pollution,
and then we're going to spray it with spray bottles
and see where all the water and the pollution collects.
I think we're ready to pollute.
This glitter could be silt or chemicals.
My prediction is that
the pollution will get all mixed up in the watershed.
When we spray the water bottles,
all of the water's going through and down the mountainside.
All of it's going to turn into streams,
and then they're going to all mix in to a river.
This is a water bottle filled with water,
and it's going to simulate the rain.
I see the food coloring
raining down the side of the mountain while she's spraying.
I see most of it's dripping down this way.
Some of it's dripping down that way.
[spraying]
It's all collecting.
Oh, yes!
See, and it's getting into a purple color like I predicted.
Sometimes, pollution has oil in it.
You want to put some oil in?
Sure.
Oh, dear!
I like the oil because it doesn't mix with water.
I think it is working exactly like a real watershed
because all the rain's going down
and making it fall down the mountain peaks
and going into the ocean.
We need to take some pictures of our watershed for Plum.
Imagine if this was a source of drinking water.
I don't think that this would be very good
because all of the mountains are polluted.
Maybe we should protect our watershed.
It's like on Plum Landing when Oliver discovered
when he dumped his trash, it didn't just go away,
it went to an actual place: a river.
♪