Unit 5: Societal Implications of Climate Change: Stakeholder Report
Sea-level rise due to the melting of glaciers and ice sheets and ocean thermal expansion has significant societal and economic consequences. In this final unit, students prepare a summary of the impacts of sea ...

Getting started with Structure from Motion (SfM) photogrammetry
Structure from Motion (SfM) photogrammetry method uses overlapping images to create a 3D point cloud of an object or landscape. It can be applied to everything from fault scarps to landslides to topography. This ...

Plate Tectonics: GPS Data, Boundary Zones, and Earthquake Hazards
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 ...

Indiana River Meanders Mapping Exercise
In Indiana, major rivers and their tributaries cross much of the state. These rivers can produce significant hazards related to flooding and erosion, which threaten nearby residents and infrastructure. Rivers are ...

Topographic differencing: Earthquake along the Wasatch fault
After a big earthquake happens people ask, 'Where did the earthquake occur? How big was it? What type of fault was activated?' We designed an undergraduate laboratory exercise in which students learn how ...

Detecting Cascadia's changing shape with GPS | Lessons on Plate Tectonics
Research-grade Global Positioning Systems (GPS) allow students to deduce that Earth's crust is changing shape in measurable ways. From data gathered by EarthScope's Plate Boundary Observatory, students discover that the Pacific Northwest of the United States and coastal British Columbia — the Cascadia region - are geologically active: tectonic plates move and collide; they shift and buckle; continental crust deforms; regions warp; rocks crumple, bend, and will break.

Unit 1: Climate Change and Sea Level: Who Are the Stakeholders?
How are rising sea levels already influencing different regions? This unit offers case study examples for a coastal developing country (Bangladesh), a major coastal urban area (southern California), and an island ...

Unit 1: Introduction to Flooding
Do geoscientists understand the meaning of floods and their role within the broader context of ecological and societal impacts? In this unit, students are introduced to the concept of flooding and the mechanisms ...

Working with Point Clouds in CloudCompare and Classifying with CANUPO
This exercise will walk you through 1) basic operations and use in CloudCompare, and 2) use of an Open-Source plugin in CloudCompare called CANUPO (http://nicolas.brodu.net/en/recherche/canupo/) that allows for ...

Exploring California's Plate Motion and Deformation with GPS | Lessons on Plate Tectonics
Students analyze data to study the motion of the Pacific and North American tectonic plates. From GPS data, students detect relative motion between the plates in the San Andreas fault zone--with and without earthquakes. To get to that discovery, they use physical models to understand the architecture of GPS, from satellites to sensitive stations on the ground. They learn to interpret time series data collected by stations (in the spreading regime of Iceland), to cast data as horizontal north-south and east-west vectors, and to add those vectors head-to-tail.Students then apply their skills and understanding to data in the context of the strike-slip fault zone of a transform plate boundary. They interpret time series plots from an earthquake in Parkfield, CA to calculate the resulting slip on the fault and (optionally) the earthquake's magnitude.