Responses to: "The course(s) where I teach most about the Deep Earth are..."

 

• Tectonics
• Mineralogy, regarding phase transitions
• undergrad + general ed
• graduate/undergraduate elective
• geography
• Mineralogy
• Geophysics (undergrad)
• undergrad only advanced and intro
• intro-level
• upper undergrad, beginning grad
• both ugrad intro & grad upper level
• undergraduate intro to upper level
• Earth's Dynamic Interior (undergrad)

Comments and Resources Related to EarthScope talk by Greg Anderson

What is the long-term vision for Earth Scope? How do you expect the program to evolve?

• ~3 yr time frame intention to integrate ES with IRIS and UNAVCO to make more integrated facility; new science plan; ES becoming more integrated with core programs at NSF and Earth Sciences; ES new paradigm for how the sci gets done – more integrated, bigger programs that are interdisciplinary

is there a map available on the web to inform us when earthscope instrumentation will be in our neighborhood (e.g., on the east coast?)

• US Array site, with dots showing past and present seismic station locations: http://www.usarray.org/
• Interactive map showing future proposed USArray sites and dates: http://www.usarray.org/public/suggest

The main web page for the USArray transportable array: http://www.usarray.org/researchers/obs/transportable
For historical deployment of the TA: http://anf.ucsd.edu/stations/deployment_history.php
For current deployment of EarthScope instruments: http://www.earthscope.org/current_status/
You can get an image of the vertical seismogram from any of the Earthscope USArray seismographs via http://usarray.seis.sc.edu/index.html

these transportable arrays... are they permanent or do they stay for a period of time and then are relocated?? and what sensors are at each station

• They stay for a while and then move on. sensor information is available at http://www.usarray.org/researchers/instrumentation
• Information on the instruments at each station can be found at http://anf.ucsd.edu/
• insitutions can adopt a sensor pack and have it remain in place when the rest move on. Information at http://www.usarray.org/researchers/adopt

Greg Anderson: My phone number is +1.703.292.4693 and my e-mail address is greander@nsf.gov


General Morning Comments

• Glenn Richard: I have started a new thread where the COMPRES people in this workshop can identify big science ideas that we would like to present to the educational community.
• Chuck Ammon has a nice receiver function overview online at: http://eqseis.geosc.psu.edu/~cammon/HTML/RftnDocs/rftn01.html

Chats regarding the Report Out on Threaded Discussion II

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Vince Cronin: Maybe a solution to Wendy's challenge is to have nuggets of web-based tutorials for students to pursue on their own. This way, students could work on their own, and have access to visualizations, maybe some worked examples, handouts, homework problems, and so on. And teachers of varying backgrounds can point students to the tutorials, so content coverage may be more consistent from year to year.

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Wendy Panero: Vince, I like that idea a lot. I agree that as we move to an integrated curriculum, the excitement and expertise of the faculty will be uneven across some of these topics.

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Anna Courtier: Tutorials like Vince suggests could also be used as an Intro/Refresher for grad students getting ready to participate in an intensive workshop, like the CIDER summer programs. This is a need that's been voiced in other workshops I've attended.

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Abby Kavner: One of the activities I am developing is an excel spreadsheet/tool which uses mineral physics data to predict seismic wave speeds in the Earth, and graphically compare with PREM. For example, students can calculate how changes in temperature, iron content, etc., translates to variations in seismic wave speeds.

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Vince Cronin: In addition to tutorials, it would be good to populate wikipedia with information on key topics related to Earth's interior (and any other Earth science topic) starting with areas that are not currently represented. Current students (K-16+) all seem to start on the web to find information. Bottom line -- let's provide input to SERC as well as to general search targets like Wikipedia.

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Catherine Cooper: that's a great idea, Vince. The deep Earth is weak on wikipedia

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Anna Courtier: Linking some of the tutorials from CIDER with SERC may be a good idea too. Marc Hirschmann and Cin-Ty Lee did some MELTS activities when I went to CIDER in 2006.

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Glenn Richard: Regarding education about COMPRES facilities, I could begin by making a list of the various types of high pressure (e.g. diamond anvil cells) and detection (e.g. xray) equipment that COMPRES researchers use to perform their work, with the aim of documenting, for the educational community, how high pressure is done. Over the long term, we can collect visualizations, activities and other resources that could be used by educators.

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Catherine Cooper: I did a lot of linking surface processes to deep Earth in my historical class. The students seemed to enjoy it - particularly the non-majors

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Catherine Cooper: Vicki, I work through the thermal age approximations of the Earth to work through assumptions and when they are valid and when they should be questioned, etc

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Vince Cronin: A really basic question that we need to include is the whole matter of how flow in the mid- to deep mantle relates to plate motion. It seems that students come to me thinking that plates are like packages moving on conveyor belts (mantle convection cells) and are surprised when I talk about plates moving in response to slab pull, ridge push, and so on.

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Catherine Cooper: for the historical class, I went through several age approximation techniques and the physics and assumptions. But in the geophysics class, I really dig into the thermal age problem with the math/physics.

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Anna Courtier: I could use a good geoid explanation to give to my students. Is there a reference anyone would recommend that would be accessible to undergrads?

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Ray Russo: see CMR Fowler, The Solid Earth, pp. 164-165, for a standard - not "outstanding" - working explanation

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Anna Courtier: Thanks Ray. That looks like a good start. It starts on p198 of my edition.

Chats related to Brennan Jordan's Plenary Talk

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Vince Cronin: Ideas about mantle plumes moving in the mantle wind were being fully debated in the latter 1970s, and were the subject of several of Peter J. Smith's micro-reviews in Nature. I have no citations off the top of my head, but clearly remember writing summary papers about this in a geophysics course circa 1978. The discussions petered out for lack of data to sustain the discussion.

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Vince Cronin: Note the interesting parallel with the development of ideas on salt structures. Older ideas of diapiric rise of low-density salt through higher density sediments seem to have been replaced in the wake of more recent developments, such as the physical models of Bruno Vendeville and Martin Jackson at the Applied Geodynamics Lab, Bureau of Economic Geology (http://www.beg.utexas.edu/indassoc/agl/animations/AGL95-MM-001/index.html). Current understanding is that salt movement and sedimentation are largely synchronous and linked processes.

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Mike Williams: Brennan: what is your working definition of a mantle plume... Must they originate at the core-mantle boundary. Can a plume originate at the 660, for example?

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Vince Cronin: An interesting textbook perspective on mantle plumes is provided by Don Anderson in
Anderson, D.L., 2007, New theory of the Earth: Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 384 p., ISBN-13 978-0-521-84959-3.

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Vicki Hansen: Mars and Venus have much to contribute to plume discussions. Venus has no evidence of plate tectonics and so we have an Earth-like (or at least Earth-sized) planet with no plate tectonics to disrupt the surface. we have a paper coming out in Geology this spring which argues for a surface plume footprint of ~13000 km diameter.

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Vince Cronin: Concerning antipodal hotspots, see the 1992 article
Rampino, M.R. and Caldeira, K., Antipodal hotspots on the Earth, Geophysical Research Letters 19, 2011–2014, 1992
The idea was kicking around at Dartmouth in the early 1980s.

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Vicki Hansen: Plume is hypothesis; plate tectonics is theory; I think that this is an important distinction--no matter what one's view of plumes is (i.e. yay or nay)

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Moderator (David Mogk): For folks interested in Intro Courses, do we just buy the "party line" as represented in cartoons in any of the intro books that hot spots are "the answer", prima facie evidence of plate tectonic theory, etc., OR should we present the basics of this debate as an example of the conduct of science? Are there dangers in either approach?

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Vicki Hansen: I find that students really love to hear that all is NOT agreed upon in science--this make science real to them--not boring old facts. Also the students themselves can puzzle over pro and cons--and this involves them directly in science. Controversy is good--no, great! in my opinion.

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Anna Courtier: Liz Johnson and I had students do a plume debate in the course we co-taught. I'm interested in other ideas on how to do this. We divided them into groups and assigned readings, then asked the students to write up an opinion paper after each group presented their perspectives. In the end, most students decided they agreed with the side of the debate they were assigned, rather than being swayed by anything the other group presented. Are there ways around this? Or is this OK?

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Barbara: I think that mantle plume debate.. exemplifies the process of "science" very nicely to students. Helps students get away from the idea that science is just a set of facts to memorize..

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Todd Feeley: It a perfect example to point out to students that scientists are not dogmatic, which is a common criticism of science by creationists

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Vince Cronin: I had a similar thought to Todd's. Students I encounter are sometimes told that science is some sort of conspiracy in which we scientists are compelled to toe-the-party-line. 
I try to convince them that science is sometimes (often?) a contact sport, where careers can be made by demonstrating that a popular hypothesis is not supported by reproducible observational data.

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Moderator (JM): Anna, you might get some other ideas for your debate from the Starting Point: Roleplaying module. I know that there are several debate examples there.

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Moderator (David Mogk): Also: Using Investigative Case Studies

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Vince Cronin: Some (perhaps a lot) of the initial interest in hotspot trails and mantle plumes was connected with their possible use as a frame of reference for plate-motion studies. Minster and Jordan made use of the Hawaiian hotspot in 1978. Now, we have other options for reference frames outside of the plates (VLBI, GPS, etc.)

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John Taber: GSN data can be viewed via the Rapid Earthquake Viewer http://rev.seis.sc.edu/

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Suzanne Baldwin: We've seen +/-1% and +/-5% anomalies . How should a geologist interpret these differences in deviations from the radial Earth model?

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Pamela_Burnley: does the vertical uncertainty become horizontal uncertainty at the bottom of the tomographic image?

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Catherine Cooper: so, could you write a guide for non-seismologist at how to gauge "honest tomographers"?

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Suzanne Baldwin: It's 4-D- the Earth evolves over time

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Abby Kavner: Q: humans are predisposed to seeing patterns, even when they don't exist. How do we teach students about scientific approaches to test our pattern recognition tendencies?

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John Taber: Could you expand on why attenuation tomo is more sensitive to plumes than travel times?

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Brennan Jordan: So many questions. I'll limit myself. Two questions. Can you summarize the seismology community's perspective on banana-doughnut tomography? To what degree are only shown cherry-picked inversion results?

 

 

Chats related to Garnero's Presentation

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Moderator (Dave Mogk): Drawing representations is the basis for Steve Reynolds' work on using Concept Sketches as an indicator of learning...

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Barbara Graham: perfect for gen ed students.. when you make it relevant to their lives they remember

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Anna Courtier: http://web.utah.edu/thorne/animations.html

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Moderator (Dave Mogk): Cool figures, but somehow we need to convey to novices what parts have special meaning, what info may be extraneous

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Abby Kavner: Q: re: honest: how (as lecturers) do we differentiate between what science doesn't know (research area) and what we don't know personally (professorial ignorance?)

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Vicki Hansen: Ed, do you ever have your student's draw what they think the interior looks like, at the beginning of a semester say, and again at the end of the semester?

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Wendy Panero: Vicki- I was thinking along the same lines. Maybe even having little stop points along different lectures to ask them to draw things?

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Anna Courtier: Vicki - I do a before and after like that for Earth Structure lectures. I give them a blank sheet of paper with a big white circle on each side, and ask them to fill it in. I like Wendy's idea of stopping points, too.

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Vicki Hansen: I routinely tell my students that my own ignorance is wide and deep--and students actually seem to respect that, and we focus on how we know what we know, so we can focus on the science and the science process.

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Suzanne Baldwin: I tell my mineralogy students that each year what we think we know about the mantle changes. I have the students go off and research a different phase (ringwoodite, majorite, etc) and then present what they found to the group.

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Abby Kavner: Oh no---I deal with this all the time. I use a whole variety of methods, but especially focus on the "Scientists come in all shapes and sizes and genders" approach

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Wendy Panero: I have the same problem with age. I've made some progress by only introducing myself as Dr. Panero and emphasizing my academic pedigree. But it's really frustrating when students assume I'm a grad student instructor.

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Michael Wysession: I tell them that Alexander Pope was the last person who had read every book published in his or her time. And since then, we are just too overwhelmed with info.

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Anna Courtier: I use the Dr title, too. I think it helps. I also use "old" pop culture references a lot, which automatically leads the students to assume I am "old" (and therefore qualified).

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Vicki Hansen: I tell my students that if their goal is to stump the chump--(ME), then they really don't have much of a challenge. We focus on working together to try to figure things out.

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Mike Williams: Ed, will you share the animation(s) that you didn't show? Also, can you describe the red laser in water experiment. Can we do this in class?

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Moderator (JM): We now have a page in the Deep earth module that displays some of the links that Ed passed along as well as a link directly to his site of visualizations and imagery. http://serc.carleton.edu/NAGTWorkshops/deepearth/garnero.html

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Ed Garnero: Yes, of course. some are on my website @ http://garnero.asu.edu/research_images but I should make a site for some of these movies. I'll try it as we carry on here.

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Ed Garnero: I just stuck some animations/movies along w/ my presentation at: http://garnero.asu.edu/NAGT

 

Chats related to Cronin's Presentation

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Anna Courtier: Quantitative points at the Intro level is great. We get a lot of majors who declare after Physical Geology and then are surprised at the math/phys/chem requirements of the major.

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Wendy Panero: I love the gas tank sensor analogy. Perfect.

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Moderator (Dave Mogk): "Back of the envelope" calculations are a great way to use quantitative reasoning, with low anxiety....Students need to at least understand order of magnitude or scale of natural features....

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Moderator (JM): The adding machine paper trick is great for earth history too. Never thought of using it for the deep earth. Great idea.

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Catherine Cooper: I did a sense of scale exercise for time with my students. made them split up something personal in their lives according to different portions of geo time

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Abby Kavner: Downside of props: there is always that student who writes "Prof K is *so* clumsy" in their course evaluation...

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Vicki Hansen: good idea, one could also to earth radius by comparison with their height

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Catherine Cooper: worked out great - got pieces of novels, tv episodes, road trips, cheese on nachos

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Edwards, Benjamin: this bouncing ball demo for travel time is excellent!!!

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Wendy Panero: Those with a Mac Laptop, there's an accelerometer in the laptop. SeisMac is free software to show seismograms. My laptop was able to pick up the "seismogram" of me stomping right next to the computer and from the back of the room.

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Moderator (JM): Following on Wendy's comment, there were some activities that folks at the 2007 Geophysics workshop created to use the SeisMac program in their classes. http://serc.carleton.edu/NAGTWorkshops/geophysics07/index.html

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John Taber: There are also 2 SeisMac activities at http://www.iris.edu/hq/resource/seismac_activity_1 and http://www.iris.edu/hq/resource/seismac_activity_2

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Edwards, Benjamin: we've talked about getting some iPod Touches for doing this sort of demo in lab, as you can get an iSeismo app that works pretty well also

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Ed Garnero: i should probably document this in a word doc, but in huge lecture forums I have this experiment I do to demonstrate bending wave fronts in a medium w/ increasing velocity with depth. I make every row in the class an earth layer and students in that row have a "property" (how long they count when a wave hits them). it is a classic huygen's principle problem. The "earthquake" is the student in the back of room on one side; the receiver is the student in the back corner on the other side. Turns out fastest path of the wave (students touching each other after their counting) always goes thru the middle of the planet (front of room) which is not the shortest path...

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John Taber: You can also get an inexpensive ($50) USB sensor through the Quake Catcher Network http://qcn.stanford.edu/

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Ed Garnero: I try to do as many demos as possible, but I always get student volunteers to do them. I have always hoped that helps them feel part of the science

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Anna Courtier: How do you get them to volunteer, Ed? I have a class of 108 and it is like pulling teeth to get someone to do a demo.

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Catherine Cooper: I use candy bribes to get volunteers

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Ed Garnero: I say "I need a (some) volunteer(s)! raise your hand!" if I get no bites I just walk up to someone and say, "you, come on down, this will be fun!"

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Moderator (Dave Mogk): I bring a bag of Hershey kisses and send folks a kiss when they do something (anything)...Like parenting, good teaching through bribery

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Ed Garnero: for my chemical weathering experiment, I make coffee, grinding beans to different degrees, water at different temperatures, etc. like 3 or 4 volunteers. I start by saying (1) who drinks coffee? (2) who NEEDS coffee? then I choose.

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Ed Garnero: Oh, last comment: I posted my "waves in the auditorium' big classroom experiment description in a PDF on http://garnero.asu.edu/NAGT

Chats related to Kavner's Presentation

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Glenn Richard: Abby, do you have your students manipulate physical or virtual models to help them understand different forms of close packing?

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Wendy Panero: Glenn. I have students work with different sized styrofoam balls.

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Ed Garnero: wendy: me too. turns out a normal sized marble and tennis balls are great for tetrahedron, and ping pong ball and tennis balls is great for cubic. I have pairs of students try to find the best (most compact) arrangement of these. it's sort of a flop demo, since you can't quite see everything they do, but we all laugh about that, so it sort of works....

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Glenn Richard: Slightly sticky balls might be a good idea, so that students' constructions hold together as they manipulate them.

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Anna Courtier: Velcro?

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Moderator (Dave Mogk): In mineralogy and petrology I try to emphasize chemical work (free energy) and mechanical work in the earth system, and how these necessarily feedback on each other. "Work" done by Earth is a central theme to my courses

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Glenn Richard: I wonder whether slightly magnetized steel balls would work - or would polarity cause problems?

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Vicki Hansen: Abby, do you have any tricks for helping student to understand the various properties, like the values of viscosity?

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Suzanne Baldwin: For mineralogy classes, do you use the crystal maker program to teach them about coordination number? I found this really helps them visualize tetrahedral vs octahedral coordination.

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Barbara Graham: I would like to see feedback from instructors after they have implemented the activities in the classroom.. What worked, what didn't work.. and what was discovered.. sometimes we can come up with what we think is a great activity.. but as we sometimes find out, it does not do well in the classroom or it is a huge success.

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Abby Kavner: Comment: It's challenging to come up with exercises that help students develop quantitative skills.

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Catherine Cooper: I like Barbara's idea - could there be a section in the activity page about how well it worked?

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Glenn Richard: Having students use data to explore these topics is a good strategy employed by some of these activities, that provides students with a feeling for the process of doing science.

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Vicki Hansen: It is useful to also help the students to know that our role is not that of teachers, but actually that of designing an environment in which they can best learn.

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Vince Cronin: The low-tech way for authors to gain feedback is just to have a prominent statement on the activity that solicits input from people who use the resource.

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Moderator (JM): http://serc.carleton.edu/quantskills

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Vince Cronin: One thing that I struggle with is developing quantitative problems that involve several sequential steps, while not having a cook-book fill-in-the-blank approach. (I usually default to the fill-in-the-blank...)

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Suzanne Baldwin: Integrating math into the curriculum has become more and more challenging because students come into these courses without the sufficient skills required to attack a quantitative activity. Here at SU the faculty are talking about developing a course devoted to math used in earth sciences, so the students can see the applications.

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Catherine Cooper: yes, this is the constant struggle in my geophysics class! I've even had students say they don't trust geology if it has math in it

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Barbara Graham: wow.. doubting math?? where does this phobia of math come from and how do we dismiss it to students.. A constant struggle with my students..

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Glenn Richard: Yes, I have had students remind me that "this is not a math class".

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Catherine Cooper: I think maybe a sophomore level problem solving course might be good

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Barbara Graham: absolutely!! Standard question before every exam or quiz.. "Do I need my calculator"!!

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Cathy Manduca: There is a good discussion of Teaching the Process of Science that may be of interest here: http://serc.carelton.edu/sp/process_of_science/index.html.

I share your frustration with worksheets being flat. You can add your example to the Process of Science example collection too! It would be nice to have some deep earth there.

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Moderator (JM): Another resource you can use to help "backfill" on the Quantitative skills folks bring to class is The Math You Need When You Need It: http://serc.carleton.edu/mathyouneed - it's a set of tutorials on particular kinds of math that we use a lot in geoscience that you can send your students to right before they need it in your class.

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Cathy Manduca: Vince, I was just part of a conversation thinking about the same kind of resource for Stats across the curriculum

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Catherine Cooper: these are graduate students who can't do the math. I have to re-explain derivatives and integrals

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Abby Kavner: Learning math is one thing. Using it is something else completely.

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Cathy Manduca: Biology certainly shares this concern

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Glenn Richard: At Stony Brook, we had courses in "computer programming for the geosciences". We taught students how to program in Java, then had them implement models of geoscience phenomena by writing their own programs - with a lot of guidance. Math, of course, played a prominent role in this process.

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Barbara Graham: across the board. We have tried to make math prerequisite.. but at a community college it is almost impossible. most of the time students wait until the end of their 4th semester to start taking math. thus it is a disaster and they wind up having to take more semesters just to complete their math

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Cathy Manduca: It is really clear that excellent students with much success in math still need help in the transfer. There is a nice discussion of the issues of quantitative prep for graduate school on the quantitative skills site.

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Anna Courtier: Vince, your idea for a textbook pairing geology and calculus is fantastic.

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Cathy Manduca: I'm also wondering if we don't scare off strong quantitative students in intro -- how about a special math rich quantitative into.

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Barbara Graham: team teaching with a math instructor would be a great idea. This would bring relevance to the math course as well as help with real world applications.

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Anna Courtier: Many of our students do very poorly in Calculus classes (sometimes taking it several times) because they don't see the relevance and have a lot of trouble with the abstractness of the math.

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Catherine Cooper: I'm with that point - I think we don't attract quantitative students by saying "hey we go on awesome field trips" b/c that's not just what we do

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Catherine Cooper: right, @Anna - I try really hard to explain the physical meaning of every equation I put on the board. I sometimes even write out the words of the meaning of the equation

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Vince Cronin: oops... For access to Tim Lutz's paper on shadow courses in calculus, go to http://www.nagt.org/nagt/jge/sept_2000.html#v48p474.

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Anna Courtier: @Katie, scrolling back to see your comment about students not trusting the math. I've run in this too - had a student who didn't believe in anything that had to do with the mass of the Earth because he didn't believe we could determine that with the math/phys

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Catherine Cooper: it's just mind blowing, but I do think that a bit of it is who were are attracting to the science

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Moderator (JM): @Vince: Measurement and Uncertainty http://serc.carleton.edu/quantskills/teaching_methods/uncertainty/index.html

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Catherine Cooper: I think that I must have been really lucky b/c I had an awesome high school calculus teacher who told us along the way, the reasons why you use the equations

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Glenn Richard: http://phet.colorado.edu/index.php

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Catherine Cooper: @Vince - great idea. maybe as part of a grad student's prelims. no matter what their field is. that's what I took in undergrad - all engineering math & physics

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Catherine Cooper: conservation equations

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Glenn Richard: Add the gravitational attraction equation to the list.

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John Taber: f=ma

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Vicki Hansen: I think that we really need to help student to APPLY the mat eqns and concepts as Katie indicated--and this can be done at all levels, using trig, alegbra, calc