Lake Ice Phenology Module
C.C. Carey; J.L. Klug; D.C. Richardson
Lakes are changing worldwide due to altered climate. Many lakes that were historically frozen in the winter are now experiencing fewer days of ice cover and earlier ice-off dates. In this module, students will ...

Plate Tectonics: GPS Data, Boundary Zones, and Earthquake Hazards
Christopher Berg, Orange Coast College; Julie Elliott, Michigan State University; Beth Pratt-Sitaula, EarthScope
Students work with high precision GPS data to explore how motion near a plate boundary is distributed over a larger region than the boundary line on the map. This allows them to investigate how earthquake hazard ...

Measuring Plate Motion with GPS: Iceland | Lessons on Plate Tectonics
Roger Groom, Mt. Tabor Middle School; Cate Fox-Lent, UNAVCO; Shelley E Olds, EarthScope Consortium; Nancy West, Quarter Dome Consulting; David Thesenga, Front Range Community College
This lesson teaches middle and high school students to understand the architecture of GPS—from satellites to research quality stations on the ground. This is done with physical models and a presentation. Then students learn to interpret data for the station's position through time ("time series plots"). Students represent time series data as velocity vectors and add the vectors to create a total horizontal velocity vector. They apply their skills to discover that the Mid-Atlantic Ridge is rifting Iceland. They cement and expand their understanding of GPS data with an abstraction using cars and maps. Finally, they explore GPS vectors in the context of global plate tectonics.

Remote Sensing Applications in Hydrology
Dr. Manuela Girotto, University of California, Berkeley; Dr. Viviana Maggioni, George Mason University; Emad Habib, University of Louisiana at Lafayette
The module offers background content on the fundamentals of remote sensing, but also integrates a set of existing online tools for visualization and analysis of satellite observations. Specifically, students are ...

Water Quality Module
Castendyk, D.; Gibson, C.
Water quality is a critical concept for undergraduate students studying Earth Sciences, Biology, and Environmental Sciences. Many of these students will be asked to assess the impacts of a proposed anthropogenic ...

Lake Mixing Module
C.C. Carey; J.L. Klug; R.L. Fuller
Stratified lakes exhibit vertical gradients in organisms, nutrients, and oxygen, which have important implications for ecosystem structure and functioning. Mixing disrupts these gradients by redistributing these ...

Lesson 3: The Value of a Water Footprint (High School)
Kai Olson-Sawyer, GRACE Communications Foundation
Session 1 of this lesson begins with a quick activity to get students thinking about their direct and virtual water use. It introduces a few new ideas for virtual water use that may surprise students, including the ...

Paleoclimate and Ocean Biogeochemistry
Allison Jacobel, Middlebury College
This module guides students through an examination of how surface ocean productivity relates to global climate on glacial-interglacial timescales and how the availability of ocean nutrients can be correlated with ...

Teleconnections
Farrell, K.J.; Cayelan Carey, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University; Kaitlin Farrell, University of Georgia
Ecosystems can be influenced by teleconnections, in which meteorological, societal, and/or ecological phenomenon link remote regions via cause and effect relationships. Because it is difficult to predict how ...

Wind and Ocean Ecosystems
Alanna Lecher, Lynn University; April Watson, Lynn University
Wind has a fundamental impact on ocean ecosystems. Wind drives physical processes, including current development and upwelling through Ekman transport. These physical processes, in turn, have cascading impacts on ...