Tara Curtin

Flooding in the Finger Lakes Region, NY part of Quantitative Skills:Activity Collection
In this several week-long introductory geoscience project, students evaluate the potential for flooding in the local region. Students visit the site during the first week of the semester as part of a "Walk in the Watershed" and make observations in order to generate hypotheses about the processes that shape the landscape and control the movement of water. During a later lab period, students return to the same site to determine stream discharge using the flotation and current meter methods and compare and contrast the results from the two methods. In addition, students in the different laboratory sections use their data to compare and contrast reasons for why discharge may have changed over the course of the day or week during the following class meeting. As an in-class exercise, students examine an annual hydrograph and then predict the weather that generated the observed stream discharge. Students test their hypotheses by analyzing precipitation data available on-line in order to correlate flood events with storm types or other causes for major discharge events. Next, students examine historical flood and discharge data of the local stream available on-line at http://nwis.waterdata.usgs.gov/ as a homework assignment. In addition to calculating the recurrence interval and probability of occurrence for each event, students determine the discharge and stage of a 1-, 10-, 50-, and 100-year flood, create a rating curve, and generate a floodway map for each of these events. Subsequently, students revisit the site during lab and locate the boundaries of these flood events. Students will make recommendations for building a house in the region based on their analyses.

A Traverse Through Time and Space: A Paleoenvironmental Analysis of Devonian Strata in New York State part of Cutting Edge:Geoscience in the Field:Activities
This is a field-based mini-project that requires students to synthesize their field data to 1) determine the depositional environments both across New York State (from the Catskills, NY to Rochester, NY) during the Lower and Middle Devonian, 2) recognize major unconformities, and 3) decipher the relationship between tectonics and sedimentation.

ENV 170 The Fluid Earth part of Quantitative Skills:Courses
This is an introductory course with no pre-requisites that uses the global water cycle to teach important geological concepts.