Continental Glaciation - Landforms

Rich Whittecar
,
Old Dominion University
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Summary

This exercise provides reinforcement for student learning of the processes under and around continental ice sheets that form geomorphic features. The goal is to strengthen each student's ability to associate the geomorphic process, setting, landform shape, and geologic materials expectable within the landform, and their ability to describe those relationships.

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Context

Audience

undergraduate course in geomorphology

Skills and concepts that students must have mastered

use of stereoscopes and aerial photography; read and interpret topographic maps; dynamics of active and stagnant glacial ice, meltwater flow, and sediment transport in ice and water

How the activity is situated in the course

last in series of exercises that reinforce concepts about glaciology and alpine glacial landforms

Goals

Content/concepts goals for this activity

The goal is to strengthen each student's ability to associate the geomorphic process, setting, landform shape, and geologic materials expectable within the landform, and their ability to describe those relationships.

Higher order thinking skills goals for this activity

synthesizing data about where and how landforms developed under different glacial environments, and explaining the sequence of geomorphic events through time as the ice sheet retreated.

Other skills goals for this activity

Description of the activity/assignment

To prepare for this exercise, students participate in a teacher-led discussion about processes of erosion and deposition in different environments under and around continental ice sheets. They then work in small groups of 2-3 to examine stereopairs of examples of landforms representative of subglacial and end-glacial settings. The culminating set of questions require them to find and analyze the sequence of formation of a dozen or so landforms from different glacial environments scattered over one topographic quadrangle.
Designed for a geomorphology course
Has minimal/no quantitative component

Determining whether students have met the goals

Responses during closure discussion; written responses to questions asked at end of this class

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