Site Guide: Volcanoes

General Collections

Resources for Teaching Petrology - This collection of pages hosts a variety of educational and supporting materials for teaching igneous and metamorphic petrology. These collections reflect the contributions of faculty members from across the country, and will continue to grow as new materials and tools are developed. You will find links to activities and assignments, internet and computer resources, analytical instruments and tools, presentations from the summer 2003 workshop on Teaching Petrology, a email list, and lots of creative ideas for teaching petrology.

Resources for Teaching Geochemistry - This project provides an on-line tutorial ofthe analytical techniques commonly used to characterize geological materials. The goal is to help novices (such as students or scientists working out of their field) to gain an understanding of mineralogical, petrological and geochemical analytical techniques.

Volcano-related Teaching Resources from On the Cutting Edge - This browsable list of resources contains nearly 200 activities, course descriptions, and tools and datasets that may be useful in the undergraduate and advanced high school classroom. The browse can be narrowed further by geoscience subdiscipline and/or by resource type.

Exploring the Yellowstone Geoecosystem - The Yellowstone collection contains an assortment of digital resources relevant to the many components of the Yellowstone Geoecosystem: geology, geophysics, physiography, hydrology, biota (from microbes to grizzly bears), and human activities and their consequences in this amazing natural laboratory. This collection contains an abundance of maps, images, virtual field trips, datasets, technical papers and general information.

Montana-Yellowstone Geologic Field Guide Database - The Montana-Yellowstone Geologic Field Guide Database is a pilot project for making the field guide literaturemore accessible and useful to geoscience educators, students, and researchers. While the database is not an exhaustive listing of every published field guide, nor does it provide direct links to the full text of each reference (except for a few unpublished field guides which are reproduced as pdf files), the database is a fully-searchable listing of 50 of the best references for exploring the geology of this fascinating region.

Yellowstone Thermal Viruses Microbial Observatory - This is one of several microbial observatory (MO) features that are part of SERC's Microbial Life Educational Resources project. These MO pages highlight scientific research being done at a variety of environments. The Microbial Life project also features collections of information on heat-loving organisms called thermophiles as well as an MO about molecular diversity in the Red Layer at Yellowstone National Park.

Teaching Activities

Petrology Teaching Activities Table of Contents - This page is part of the Cutting Edge Petrology collection and lists teaching activities developed by geoscience professionals that are organized by topic. The petrology collection also features a thematic collection of teaching resources regarding minerals, inclusions, and volcanic processes and a guide (and links) to geochemical data plotting programs.

Volcano Exploration Project: Pu`u `O`o Activities - This collection of activities from the National Association of Geoscience Teachers (NAGT) offers nineteen activities related to the Volcanoes Exploration Project: Pu`u `O`o (VEPP). VEPP is supported and funded by the USGS Hawaiian Volcano Observatory (HVO), National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and the University of Hawaii at Manoa, and the eruptive vent has been instrumented with a variety of sensors, including GPS, tiltmeters, seismometers, cameras, and even a continuously operating gravimeter. Data from these sensors, as well as GPS campaigns conducted every few months, are available on-line for use in college and university courses via the Volcanoes Exploration Project: Pu`u `O`o (VEPP) Web site. More information on VEPP is also available from the NAGT VEPP module.

EarthChem Geochemical Database Example Exercises and Activities - This site hosts 9 examples of teaching activities or laboratories related to volcanology that are designed for the undergraduate or graduate level. Each example has a short summary and a link to teaching notes and teaching materials. Examples of resources in this collection include Compositional Diversity in Volcanic Suites, Volcanic Fields of North America, and Cenozoic Volcanic History of the Western United States

Visualizations and Tools

Volcano Visualization Collection - This collection presents links to visualizations of volcanoes and volcanic processes. Visualizations include general depictions of igneous processes as well as work done on real volcanos on Earth and around the solar system.

The Earth Exploration Toolbook - The Earth Exploration Toolbook has a number of data-rich activities designed for high school classrooms including Analyzing Plate Motion Using EarthScope GPS Data and Evidence for Plate Tectonics. The site browse will give you a complete list of volcano related activities.