Lecture Tutorials for Introductory Physical Geology part of Introductory Courses: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 ...

Feldspar Minerals and Triangle Diagrams part of Introductory Courses: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 ...

Igneous Rocks and Triangle Diagrams part of Introductory Courses: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 ...

Seafloor Spreading: Bathymetry, Anomalies, and Sediments part of Introductory Courses: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 ...

Working with Climate Change Data part of Introductory Courses: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 ...

Tracking Sea Level and Paleoenvironments with Fossils part of Introductory Courses: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 ...

Poster Project for an Introductory Physical Geology Course part of Introductory Courses: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 ...

Relative and Absolute Geologic Time with Maps and Spreadsheets part of Introductory Courses: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 Introductory Courses: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 ...

Earthquake Seismograms and Spreadsheets part of Introductory Courses: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 ...