Renewable, Non-renewable and Flow Resources

Remember from earlier grades

In Grade 4 you learned that Canada has many natural resources and sorted them into renewable and non-renewable. In Grade 5 science you compared renewable and non-renewable energy sources.

In Grade 7 you will think like a geographer. You will add a third group, flow resources, and you will ask a big geography question: Why are resources found where they are?

A hook: where did your breakfast come from?

Think about a bowl of cereal with milk. The grain grew in soil with sunlight and rain. The bowl might be made from clay or plastic (and plastic is usually made from oil or natural gas). The spoon is a metal that was dug out of the ground. The truck that brought the cereal burned fuel.

Everything you use starts as a natural resource.

Three kinds of natural resources

1. Renewable resources can be replaced by nature in a fairly short time, if people don't use them faster than they grow back.

• Examples: trees, natural fish stocks, soil, plants, wild animals.
• Careful: a renewable resource can still run out! If people catch fish faster than the fish can reproduce, the fish disappear. Soil forms very slowly, often over hundreds of years, so it must be protected.

2. Non-renewable resources formed over millions of years. Once they are used up, nature will not replace them in any time that matters to people.

• Examples: fossil fuels (coal, oil, natural gas), metallic minerals (iron, nickel, copper, gold), uranium.
• Metals can often be recycled, which helps, but the deposit in the ground does not grow back.

3. Flow resources are always moving or arriving. We can't use them up, but we can only use them when and where they happen.

• Examples: sunlight, wind, running water in rivers, tides, ocean currents.
• The sun doesn't shine at night, the wind isn't always blowing, and you can only build a tidal power station where there are big tides.

Resources and Earth's physical features

Resources are not spread evenly around the world. Where they are depends on Earth's physical features: the type of rock, landforms, climate, soil and water.

• Fossil fuels form in sedimentary rock, the layered rock that builds up in ancient seas and swamps. Canada's oil and natural gas are mostly in the thick layers of sedimentary rock under the Interior Plains (Alberta, Saskatchewan and northeastern British Columbia).
• Metal ores like nickel, copper and gold are often found in very old igneous and metamorphic rock, like the rock of the Canadian Shield. That's why Ontario has mining towns like Sudbury (nickel and copper) and Timmins (gold) on the Shield.
• Forests need the right climate and soil. The huge boreal forest stretches across northern Canada, where winters are long and cold.
• Fish are often plentiful in shallow ocean water over continental shelves, like the Grand Banks off Newfoundland, where sunlight and nutrients help tiny ocean life grow.
• Running water for hydroelectricity needs rivers that drop from high land to low land, like the rivers flowing off the Canadian Shield or Niagara Falls.
• Wind is often strong on coasts, open plains and big lakes. Sunlight is strongest in sunny, dry places, like deserts. Tides are very large in some funnel-shaped bays, like the Bay of Fundy between New Brunswick and Nova Scotia.