Lecture Tutorials for Introductory Physical Geology part of Activities
These activities take place in a lecture setting and require ~5-10 minutes to complete. Students apply lecture topics directly to answer questions, interpret maps and photographs, perform calculations, and plot ...

Seafloor Spreading: Bathymetry, Anomalies, and Sediments part of Activities
This activity takes place in a laboratory setting and requires ~1.5-2 hours to complete. Students study the bathymetry of the South Atlantic, use magnetic reversals to interpret marine magnetic anomalies, and ...

Feldspar Minerals and Triangle Diagrams part of Activities
This activity takes place in a laboratory setting and requires ~1.5-2 hours to complete. Students learn how to read a triangle or ternary diagram. They determine physical properties of feldspars and interpret two ...

Working with Climate Change Data part of Activities
This activity takes place in a laboratory setting and requires ~1.5-2 hours to complete. Students use spreadsheets to create graphs data related to climate change: sunspots, insolation, carbon dioxide, and global ...

Igneous Rocks and Triangle Diagrams part of Activities
This activity takes place in a laboratory setting and requires ~1.5-2 hours to complete. Students observe igneous rock compositions and plot them on triangle diagrams, normalize rock compositions using a ...

Relative Dating with Art part of 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.

The Panama Passageway: Using the PBDB to constrain the timing and extent of the The Great American Biotic Interchange part of Activities
Students learn how to use the online Paleobiology Database to map changes in the distribution of fossil vertebrates in the Americas through time. They will generate distribution maps for several key fossil groups ...

Relative and Absolute Geologic Time with Maps and Spreadsheets part of 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 ...

Exploring Spreadsheets with Microsoft Excel part of Activities
This activity takes place in a laboratory setting and requires ~1.5-2 hours to complete. Students work with a large set of earthquake data, examine types of charts available in Excel, and use a spreadsheet to ...

Working with State, National, and Global Petroleum Data part of Activities
This activity takes place in a laboratory setting and requires ~1.5-2 hours to complete. Students work with data on oil production in Illinois, the United States, and the world, creating graphs to interpret data on ...

The Pleistocene Ice Age part of Activities
This activity takes place in a laboratory setting and requires ~1.5-2 hours to complete. Students work with data about glacial materials, Milankovitch cycles, and stable isotopes from ice cores and deep-sea ...

Earthquake Seismograms and Spreadsheets part of Activities
This activity takes place in a laboratory setting and requires ~1.5-2 hours to complete. Students read and interpret seismograms, determine the epicenter of an earthquake by triangulation, and learn how to enter ...

Topographic Maps from the US Geological Survey part of Activities
This activity takes place in a laboratory setting and requires ~1.5-2 hours to complete. Students learn how to interpret a topographic map. They read contour lines, construct a topographic profile, and calculate ...

Life through Time: Investigating biostratigraphy wth the PBDB part of Activities
Students learn how to use the Paleobiology Database (PBDB) to investigate the basic principles of biostratigraphy, including, index fossils and how fossils were used to construct the geologic timescale.

Coastal Processes CogSketch geoscience worksheet part of Activities
Sketching activity that uses a sketch-understanding program, CogSketch. Students understand sediment transport and beach erosion by using wave front geometries to sketch particle pathways and determine sediment ...

Poster Project for an Introductory Physical Geology Course part of Activities
This page details a term project that replaced the comprehensive final exam in an introductory physical geology course. For the project, each student prepares a poster showing analysis of geological data using a ...

Volcanoes at Subduction Zones part of Activities
This activity takes place in a laboratory setting and requires ~0.5 hour to complete. Students study the volcanic segmentation and earthquake distribution of the Andes continental volcanic arc. Then, they compare ...

Learning About Marine Sediments Using Real Data part of Activities
This exercise set explores marine sediments using real core photos and composition data from the scientific ocean drilling programs DSDP, ODP, and IODP in an inquiry-based approach.

Tracking Sea Level and Paleoenvironments with Fossils part of Activities
Students use the Paleobiology Database Navigator to examine changes in sea level in southeastern North America throughout the Cretaceous, Paleogene, and Neogene Periods. They will plot the change in distribution of ...

Erosion of the Grand Canyon part of Activities
Students estimate the volume of the Grand Canyon to calculate the average rate of erosion of the canyon, assuming the canyon began to form approximately 6 million years ago. They then find out how much sediment the ...