Be the Block: Working the Geologic Block Diagram as an Inquiry Tool

• Engagement—students are asked to reflect on their prior knowledge of Steno's Principles as well as the social, scientific, and technological climate of the late 18th and early 19th Century England. A few slides about Steno and the industrial age crises in England are presented.
• Exploration—placed around the room are a series of stratigraphic columns and surface expressions, with lithologies represented by different colored squares of construction paper. Some of these have overprinted on them sedimentary structures or fossils. The columns are placed in such a manner as to represent the corners and the middle of the sides of a block diagram, rendered flat as a cut-out and foldable object. Students then plot the lithologies in order on the block, connecting similar lithologies to reveal not just the cross-sections but also the surface expression. The block is then cut-out and folded into the standard block diagram.
• Explanation—the structures created by the students are evaluated compared to a master block diagram and corrections made. The remainder of the slide presentation is shared, relating the development of the geologic map by William Smith and its basis in his observations of coal mine shafts, canal excavations, and related fossils.
• Elaboration—Students are given additional block diagrams, containing only partial information, and asked to infer what would exist in the blank areas.
• Evaluation—students are given a complete block with more complex structures and asked to design, through inference, a set of columns and surface expressions that would represent the diagram and allow another student to recreate the structures.

Learn more about the course for which this activity was developed.