A Grand Tour of the Ocean Basins
Declan G. De Paor, Old Dominion University
This activity is part of the GEODE Project
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.
- First Publication: June 26, 2019
- Reviewed: December 10, 2020 -- Reviewed by the On the Cutting Edge Activity Review Process
Summary
The Tour Stops are arranged in a teaching sequence, starting with continental rifting and incipient ocean basin formation in East Africa and the Red Sea and ending with the oldest surviving fragments of oceanic crust. Transforms and fracture zones are introduced, also abandoned basins, convergent boundaries, and marginal basins. Instructors can easily change the sequence of stops to suit their courses using the Google Earth desktop app or by editing the KML file.
![[creative commons]](/images/creativecommons_16.png)
Provenance: Kristen St. John, James Madison University
Reuse: This item is offered under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/ You may reuse this item for non-commercial purposes as long as you provide attribution and offer any derivative works under a similar license.
Topics
Tectonics Grade Level
College Lower (13-14), College Upper (15-16)
Readiness for Online Use
Online Ready 
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Audience
This resource is adaptable to instructor needs. Depending on the selected tour stops it could be used in introductory to advanced geoscience courses, including physical geology, oceanography, marine geology, and structural geology.
Skills and concepts that students must have mastered
Familiarity with using Google Earth and an introduction to plate tectonics and seafloor features.
How the activity is situated in the course
This could be used to expanded on fundamentals of plate tectonics and on ocean basin formation and evolution.
Goals
Content/concepts goals for this activity
Plate tectonic movement, structures and features associated with plate tectonics in the sea floor
Higher order thinking skills goals for this activity
Other skills goals for this activity
Using of Google Earth
Description and Teaching Materials
Instructors can use these resource files to develop students exercises on several topics, such as: (a) the tectonic life cycle of an ocean basin, (b) comparisons of processes, rates, and seafloor features associated with fast and slow spreading centers, (c) simple vs. complex plate motion geometries, and (d) comparisons of hot spot and plate boundary features.
Teaching Notes and Tips
The Tour Stops are arranged in a teaching sequence, starting with continental rifting and incipient ocean basin formation in East Africa and the Red Sea and ending with the oldest surviving fragments of oceanic crust. Transforms and fracture zones are introduced, also abandoned basins, convergent boundaries, and marginal basins. Instructors can change the sequence of stops to suit their courses using the Google Earth desktop app or by editing the KML file.Because large placemark balloons tend to obscure the Google Earth terrain behind them, you are advised to keep Google Earth and this PDF document open in separate windows, preferably on separate monitors or devices. Figure captions acknowledge all data and imagery sources.
References and Resources
Original website and project -
http://csmgeo.csm.jmu.edu/Geollab/Whitmeyer/geode/GTOB2/
This is part of the GEODE Project funded by NSF DUE 1323468 and a Google curriculum award. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation or Google Inc.
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