Working with State, National, and Global Petroleum Data
Eileen Herrstrom, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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 ...

Poster Project for an Introductory Physical Geology Course
Eileen Herrstrom, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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 ...

Exercise 5: Choropleth Map of the Happiest States
Barb Tewksbury, Hamilton College
Barbara and David Tewksbury, Hamilton College Summary Students create choropleth maps by creating data tables in Excel and merging them with existing shapefiles for US states; they also evaluate the effectiveness ...

Unit 1: Hazards, vulnerability and risk
Brittany Brand, Boise State University; Pamela McMullin-Messier, Central Washington University; Melissa Schlegel, College of Western Idaho
Students will identify and apply credible geologic and social science data sets to identify local hazards and vulnerable groups and structures, and assess risk for their community.

Exercise 3: Reclassifying the New York State Geologic Map
Barb Tewksbury, Hamilton College
Barbara and David Tewksbury, Hamilton College Summary Students download and merge the multiple sheets of the New York State Geologic Map together and reclassify units to create an attractive and legible version of ...

Episodic tremor and slip: The Case of the Mystery Earthquakes | Lessons on Plate Tectonics
Shelley E Olds, EarthScope Consortium
Earthquakes in western Washington and Oregon are to be expected—the region lies in the Cascadia Subduction Zone. Offshore, the Juan de Fuca tectonic plate subducts under the North American plate, from northern California to British Columbia. The region, however, also experiences exotic seismicity— Episodic Tremor and Slip (ETS).In this lesson, your students study seismic and GPS data from the region to recognize a pattern in which unusual tremors--with no surface earthquakes--coincide with jumps of GPS stations. This is ETS. Students model ductile and brittle behavior of the crust with lasagna noodles to understand how properties of materials depend on physical conditions. Finally, they assemble their knowledge of the data and models into an understanding of ETS in subduction zones and its relevance to the millions of residents in Cascadia.

Pinpointing Location with GPS Demonstration: How GPS Works (Part 2)
Shelley E Olds, EarthScope Consortium
Using string, bubble gum, and a model of a GPS station, demonstrate how GPS work to pinpoint a location on Earth.Precisely knowing a location on Earth is useful because our Earth's surface is constantly changing from earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tectonic plate motion, landslides, and more. Thus, scientists can use positions determined with GPS to study all these Earth processes.

Unit 3: Climate Change and Food Security
Rebecca Boger, Brooklyn College, CUNY; Russanne Low, Institute for Global Environmental Strategies; Amy Potter, Armstrong State University
This unit applies a flipped classroom model. Students complete a self-study tutorial prior to attending class. Students are then asked work independently or in pairs to generate a time-aware climate change Web map ...

Unit 7.1 - Model My Watershed
Susan Gill, Stroud Water Research Center; Jim Washburne, The University of Arizona
Humans are agents of change in the Critical Zone. This unit focuses on the land/water connection and on how human-induced land use change affects local hydrology. Students will apply what they learned in the ...

Prairie Eco Services
Kelly Knight, Houston Community College System
As densely populated urban areas continue to expand, human activity is removing much-needed greenspaces from our communities; in turn, we are also removing critical buffers that are needed to combat air and water ...