A 1-page in-class exercise on compatibility diagrams.

(Note: this resource was added to OER Commons as part of a batch upload of over 2,200 records. If you notice an issue with the quality of the metadata, please let us know by using the 'report' button and we will flag it for consideration.)

A 1-page in-class exercise on compatibility diagrams.

(Note: this resource was added to OER Commons as part of a batch upload of over 2,200 records. If you notice an issue with the quality of the metadata, please let us know by using the 'report' button and we will flag it for consideration.)

A 1-page in-class exercise on compatibility diagrams.

(Note: this resource was added to OER Commons as part of a batch upload of over 2,200 records. If you notice an issue with the quality of the metadata, please let us know by using the 'report' button and we will flag it for consideration.)

In this exercise, students use whole-rock major- and trace-element compositions of volcanic rocks to explore the origins of compositional variation in igneous suites. Large datasets from the Yellowstone and Crater Lake calderas are downloaded from the GEOROC database, imported into Excel spreadsheets, and graphed to learn about the different petrogeneses of these two volcanic suites.

(Note: this resource was added to OER Commons as part of a batch upload of over 2,200 records. If you notice an issue with the quality of the metadata, please let us know by using the 'report' button and we will flag it for consideration.)

In this exercise, students use whole-rock major- and trace-element compositions of volcanic rocks to explore the origins of compositional variation in igneous suites. With the help of detailed step-by-step instructions, datasets from the Yellowstone and Crater Lake calderas are downloaded from the GEOROC database, imported into Excel spreadsheets, and graphed in the form of "Harker" diagrams to learn about the different petrogeneses of these two volcanic suites.

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The software package known as SHAPE (Shape Software 521 Hidden Valley Road, Kingsport, TN 37663) provides an excellent method for accurately drawing crystals. The following three boxes describe the basic steps involved in using SHAPE. Refer to these instructions when completing the exercises.

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The intent is to provide a map-based framework, complete with animations showing the geologic evolution of the area to be visited, so that students can then better appreciate the observations made at the various stops along the way and see how they each relate to the other and the big picture.

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Introduction: Understanding market price fluctuations is difficult for the average consumer as they are not often cognizant of what raw materials are used for various products. The goal of this lesson is to illustrate as many of the economic principles related to mineral commodities as possible and, as the lesson is ideally taught in the context of an earth or environmental science course, to couple these principles with the realities of mineral mining and subsequent processes required to produce a raw material from an ore. The lesson uses copper as an analog for such commodities. While the scope of this lesson is, then, quite unusual for high school students, these concepts are quite necessary to produce a populace who can make educated, socially-responsible, and economically-prudent decisions in both their political and personal lives.

Background: This lesson is ideal for any situation where the goal is to teach earth or environmental science students about the realities of mineral commodities, how they are extracted, and how supply and demand for them work to create that market, produce goods, and affect the environment. In the real world, most of the supply-chain for such products is hidden from the end-use consumer. This is certainly not intentional on the part of governments and corporations, necessarily, but is pretty typical due to the remote nature of most mining operations and the lack of contact that consumers have with various mid-level parts of this supply chain. Typically, the only exposure to mineral commodity prices will occur when this consumer wishes to purchase a product that contains those minerals and whose price is observed to not be consistent over time. Petroleum is a common example of this in our everyday lives, but it is no different than any other. Thus, this lesson focuses on the life cycle of copper, which is a mineral commodity that most of us think little about in our day to day lives yet is just as prevalent and important as other commodities like petroleum.

Conceptests are single item multiple choice questions given in the middle of a lecture to assess students' learning of basic concepts. Because Conceptests are projected during class, it is relatively easy to include snippets of data. Students' understanding of the target concepts can then be assessed based on how well they interpret the data rather than how well they answer verbal questions. The Conceptests on this website use bathymetric data from mid-ocean ridges (MOR's) and test students' understanding of MOR volcanism, plate motion direction, seafloor aging, and sedimentation.

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Concept puzzles are ways to give students practice thinking about geophysical methods and problems. These are used as individual or group in-class activities that can take between 10-45 minutes.
Has minimal/no quantitative component

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This activity represents a culmination project for this unit by means of which students can assess whether the IPCC prediction of increased storminess as an outcome of global warming survives testing. For the previous three weeks students will have conducted several inquiry-based group activities designed to introduce and reinforce fundamental meteorology/climatology concepts. In this 2-day project, students access online AVHRR SST imagery, as well as tabulated numeric data regarding historical North American tropical cyclones, import data into Excel for interpretation and analysis, and submit two group reports.

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Students will use map views and cross-sectional profiles across the Red Sea to determine plate tectonic processes in the region. Google Earth is a technological tool used to facilitate the investigation.

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The goal of this activity is to provide students an opportunity to connect soil science to surficial geology by using a Soil Surveys. By the end of the activity, students should be able to use a Soil Survey to identify and interpret landforms and surficial features. This activity can be adapted to variety of process (ex. eolian deposits, glacial deposits, bedrock weathering, etc.). County-level soil surveys are available in both paper and online formats for the majority of the United States.
Designed for a geomorphology course
Has minimal/no quantitative component

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This laboratory activity takes place in a computer lab that is equipped with ArcGIS (we are currently using ArcGIS 9.3). Students will go to NASA's oil spill gallery website and download the full size image of the Deepwater Horizon oil slick from July 14th, 2010 taken by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA's Aqua satellite at 1:55 p.m. Central Daylight Time. Their task is to to analyze the satellite imagery as an RGB composite and to experiment with reclassification techniques to subdivide the continuous raster dataset into user-defined numbers of ranges that will help visualize the oil spill. The activity introduces students to GIS software, remote sensing analysis, and sets up questions on spatial patterns and consequences of energy use.

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Introductory exploration of GIS as a conservation biology tool. This activity was designed as a one time use of GIS to support Conservation Biology (taught by another professor) a senior level elective biology course.

Numerical models are widely used to simulate systems ranging from climate to traffic jams, yet a high percentage of college-level students have little awareness of how they are constructed and their limitations. This activity is intended to introduce students to the construction and use of a simple conservation equation model using MATLAB. Students will construct, with the help of the instructor, a MATLAB script to simulate inputs and outputs to and from a water tank and the tracking of water volume through time. The activity includes calibration and verification of their model using data on flows observed in the water tank.

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In order to be able to undertake this assignment, students will not only have to follow and interact in class but also read and understand papers at home. After a first simple question on the tectonic style of the mountain range students will have to apply what they learn from the paper from DeCelles and Giles (1996) and Graham et al. (1986), assigned to read as homework, to answer the first set of examples. Consequently, I have developed a second-part exercise designed to help students understand the relationship between source and sediments; they will use data provided in the exercise to constrain the rates and patterns of source exhumation. In order to answer the second-part exercise students will have to read a suite of papers on detrital thermochronology (Bernet et al., 2002; Carrapa et al., 2003); this will enhance their capability of independently assess complex scientific issues. They will also have to apply simple equations to calculate the rate of source exhumation (through the concept of lag time).

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This assignment is meant to illustrate how the advection of heat by groundwater leads to the elevated temperatures at shallow sedimentary basin margins at which Mississippi Valley-type Zn-Pb hydrothermal ore deposits are formed. The assignment is based on analytical solutions for groundwater flow and heat transport published by Domenico & Palciauskas (1973). Students use a spreadsheet to calculate and plot the flow field and temperature in a sedimentary basin, and to investigate the conditions needed to produce ore-forming temperatures. These results have further implications for the length of time available for ore formation and the concentration of metals and pH of the groundwater, which are also explored in the assignment. The assignment provides an example of how groundwater plays a fundamental role in an important geologic process in the Earth's crust. The activity also shows the linkages of hydrology to other disciplines such as heat transport, geochemistry, and economic geology.

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An interactive lecture in which students use data on feeding habits and habitat, skeletons, and DNA sequences to draw phylogenetic trees.

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To prepare for this lab, students read a section of the textbook about observational techniques to measure the seafloor bathymetry as well as the occurrence of common sea floor features, such as seamounts, coastal shelves, mid-ocean ridges, and trenches. In the first lab, groups of students are provided with a bathymetric map, cutting board, sharp edges, and plenty of cardboard. They trace some contours from the map onto tracing paper, and then cut those out of the cardboard to construct a scale model of their given sea floor feature. They attach the sheets of cardboard with double-sided tape, and affix it to the bottom of a rigid box. The box lid has a grid of holes drilled into it. They determine the scale of the map (cm of the model to km in the ocean, for example), and affix the scale to the outside of the box. This concludes the first lab session.

In the second lab session, each team of students is provided with a box from an unknown team. The box is closed, and they do not know what ocean feature lay inside. They use bamboo skewers to take "soundings" at each of the drilled holes in the box lid, and mark their measurements on a piece of graph paper. Then they construct a contour map from the soundings, and try to identify the sea floor feature in the box from a global seafloor topography map that is hanging on a wall.

Students complete guided questions about the process of constructing their 3D scaled model and exploring the unknown ocean.