Photographs of snow bank structures

Audrey C. Rule, Professor of Curriculum and Instruction

State University of New York at Oswego

This activity is part of the On the Cutting Edge Peer Reviewed Teaching Activities collection. (view details)

This activity was selected for the On the Cutting Edge Reviewed Teaching Collection

This activity has received positive reviews in a peer review process involving five review categories. The five categories included in the process are

Scientific Accuracy
Alignment of Learning Goals, Activities, and Assessments
Pedagogic Effectiveness
Robustness (usability and dependability of all components)
Completeness of the ActivitySheet web page

For more information about the peer review process itself, please see https://serc.carleton.edu/teachearth/activity_review.html.

Initial Publication Date: June 15, 2006 | Reviewed: July 12, 2015 (see revision history: 2 events)

Summary

This set of photographs was taken in February 2004 in Oswego, New York on the shore of Lake Ontario, an area that receives about five meters of snow each winter because of lake-effect. Prior to photography, a large tractor-mounted snowblower cut the vertical faces of the snow banks flat, exposing the underlying structures.

Structural Geology, Sedimentary Geology | Primary (K-2), Intermediate (3-5), Middle (6-8), High School (9-12), College Lower (13-14)

Expand for more detail and links to related resources

Share your modifications and improvements to this activity through the Community Contribution Tool »

Context

Audience

The audience ranges from elementary school to college students, depending upon the instructor's purpose.

Skills and concepts that students must have mastered

Students can use this activity to review stratigraphic concepts such as original horizontality and superposition.

How the activity is situated in the course

I suggest these slides be used to review principles of stratigraphy.

Goals

Content/concepts goals for this activity

Students will recognize stratigraphic features in snow bank deposits.

Higher order thinking skills goals for this activity

Students will make observations and inferences.

Other skills goals for this activity

Students will develop explanations based on evidence.

Description of the activity/assignment

Students can review stratigraphic concepts such as original horizontality and superposition. The white layers are pure snow, the tan layers are a mixture of gravel, sand, salt, clay and snow. Dark layers are clay-sand-rich, wet with water from melting snow (salt has caused the snow to melt).

The Journal of Geoscience Education article Fourth Grade Students Investigate Stratigraphy through Experiments and Photographs of Snow Layers provides an example of how this was used in the classroom.