Relative and Absolute Geologic Time with Maps and Spreadsheets part of Introductory Courses:Activities
This activity takes place in a laboratory setting and takes ~1.5-2 hours to complete. Students apply stratigraphic principles for relative dating and basic equations of isotopic systems for absolute dating and ...

Unit 4: Impacts of Environmental Change on Organisms: Horses part of Changing Biosphere
In this unit, students will gain a deep-time perspective on how life evolves on a dynamic planet. They will use the Equidae (horse family) as a case study to examine the relationship among climate, biomes, and ...

Unit 1: Introduction to the Geologic Timeline & Mass Extinctions part of Changing Biosphere
In this unit, students will identify mass extinctions as paleontologists have done and recognize and understand the "pull of the recent," that is, the human tendency to know more about events closer to ...

Relative Dating with Art part of Introductory Courses:Activities
This activity asks students to make observations of an artwork and to deduce the sequence of events or processes that occurred during the creation of the piece.

U/Pb Dating from zircon grains near Morgan Valley, UT part of Teach the Earth:Teaching Activities
Students use real U/Pb data from zircon grains to determine the best age for field samples. Students learn about Concordia Diagrams to determine if ages from zircon grains are true. Students look at the spread of ...

Geological layers: Superposition, tilted beds and strike and dip part of Visible Geology:Teaching Materials:Activities
This workflow uses Visible Geology to show how the law of superposition can be applied to identify the youngest and oldest rocks in a layered sequence, identify the strike and dip of a tilted planar surface, and ...

Wakemup Pluton part of GET Spatial Learning:Teaching Activities
Students work through a set of questions about a geologic map of an igneous intrusion and surrounding rock units. These questions focus students' attention on the topography, geomorphology, lithology, and ...

Scaffolding Temporal Reasoning with Geologic Timelines part of Teach the Earth:Teaching Activities
This 30 minute activity engages students in ordering and spacing geologic history events on a meter stick. Students engage in an inquiry cycle, individually first, then with a partner before receiving feedback on ...

Unit 2: Causes of Mass Extinction part of Changing Biosphere
During Unit 2, students will learn about the causes of two past mass extinctions and discuss the controversies surrounding these causes and the evidence upon which the theories in the debates are based. Before ...

The Pangea Puzzle part of Introductory Courses:Activities
Students learn how to use the Paleobiology Database (PBDB) to produce maps of fossils on the present-day Earth's surface, as well as past continental configurations. They will then use these maps to understand ...

Unit 5: Summative assessment project part of Analyzing High Resolution Topography with TLS and SfM
Unit 5 is the summative assessment for the module. This final exercise takes eight to ten hours. The exercise evaluates students' developed skills in survey design, execution of a geodetic survey, and simple ...

M & M Decay part of Rates and Time:Teaching Activities
This is a simulation of radioactive decay which illustrates what a half-life is and explains some of the challenges involved with radiometric dating. Pennies or other cheap coins can be substituted for M&Ms if ...

Hierarchical Alignment of Timelines part of Rates and Time:Teaching Activities
In the hierarchical alignment activity students progressively and hierarchically align scale information to a spatial linear representation. The progressive alignment of scales may alleviate the conceptual ...

The Evolution of Earth through Time part of Rates and Time:Teaching Activities
This activity is designed for large freshman courses (>200 students) and is used in-class. The activity requires a short (15 minute) overview of Earth history before students have the opportunity to work through ...

Depositional Environments and Geologic History Labs part of Rates and Time:Teaching Activities
This is a pair of labs that incrementally prepare students to interpret the geologic history of a rock sequence. The first lab introduces students to depositional environments and fossils. The second lab presents a ...

How Many Is A Million? part of Rates and Time:Visualizations with Teaching Notes
A geoscience education resource page offering a visual demonstration using a large sheet of paper with one million hand-drawn dots to help students grasp the immensity of geologic time and large numerical scales, including downloadable PDFs and images for classroom use. auto-generated The author of this page didn't provide a brief description so this one sentence summary was created by an AI tool. It may not be completely accurate.

Roping Geologic Time part of Rates and Time:GSA Activity Posters
After having talked about the geologic time scale, I ask for two volunteers from the class to hold a rope that is 50 feet long. I say that one end is the beginning of the Earth (4.6 billion years ago), and the other is today. I then give out 16 clothes pins and ask various students to put a cloths pin on the 'time line' at various 'geologic events'. Throughout the activity I have a quiz going on where the students calculate percentages of Earth History for major geologic events, and compare it to their own ages. On their time scale, the dinosaurs died only about two 'months' ago! The exercise is very effective at letting them get a sense of how long geologic time is, and how 'recently' some major geologic events happened when you consider a time scale that is the age of the earth.

Exploring Ecosystem Vulnerability part of Pedagogy in Action:Activities
In this guided in-class tutorial, students work with IUCN Realist assessment data to evaluate how exposure, sensitivity, and adaptive capacity to calculate determine species vulnerability to modern climate change. Comparison of temperate montane and tropical reef ecosystems help students develop a deeper understanding of how ecological and environmental factors determine species' responses to change.

Introduction to Evolution (Historical Geology) part of Teach the Earth:Teaching Activities
This is a guided question note sheet with interactive elements linked within for an online course in Earth History or Historical Geology. NOVA evolution lab is one component, along with other introductory videos ...

In-Lecture Story Problems part of Teach the Earth:Teaching Activities
Authors: Dr. Kyle C. Fredrick, Department of Earth Sciences, California University of Pennsylvania (fredrick@calu.edu)Dr. Cailey B. Condit, Dept. of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences, Massachusetts ...