Earthquake Hazards Around You
Kelli Wakefield, Mesa Community College
Students chose a room where they spend a significant amount of time. Next, they assess the room for earthquake hazards, create a map depicting where these hazards are located, and finally, describe what would ...

Earthquake Hazards: The next big one?
John Taber, EarthScope Consortium
In this activity, students explore of the concept of probability and the distribution of earthquake sizes, and then work to understand how earthquake hazards are described by probabilities. Students then work in ...

Downloading Earthquake Data from the USGS Earthquake Hazards Site for Anywhere in the World and Studying it Using ArcGIS
Barb Tewksbury, Hamilton College
Students download earthquake data from the USGS Earthquake Hazards website and plot and anlyze the earthquakes using ArcMap and ArcScene.

Unit 1: Slip-sliding away: case study landslides in Italy and Peru
Sarah Hall, College of the Atlantic; Becca Walker, Mt. San Antonio College
How have mass-wasting events affected communities, and what lessons have we learned from these natural disasters that might help us mitigate future hazards? In this unit, students answer these questions by being ...

Hurricanes: Unit Overview
LuAnn Dahlman, NOAA; John McDaris, Carleton College
In this EarthLabs module, students will do hands-on experiments and study hurricanes in satellite imagery and visualizations. They'll also explore over 150 years of storm data to find out when and where these storms occur. If students are studying hurricanes during hurricane season, they can monitor the position and status of storms in real time. Hurricanes can serve as an exciting entry point into understanding everyday weather, or a culminating topic for an Earth system or environmental science unit.

Unit 1: Earthquake!
Vince Cronin, Baylor University (Vince_Cronin@baylor.edu) Phil Resor, Wesleyan University (presor@wesleyan.edu)
In this opening unit, students develop the societal context for understanding earthquake hazards using as a case study the 2011 Tohoku, Japan, earthquake. It starts with a short homework "scavenger hunt" ...

Drawing Disaster Impacts
Sara Stone, Harvard University
In this activity, students work together in small groups to explore different natural hazards that are affected by anthropogenic influence, including storms, droughts, floods, fires and heatwaves. The group work is ...

Exploring California's Plate Motion and Deformation with GPS | Lessons on Plate Tectonics
Shelley E Olds, EarthScope Consortium
Students analyze data to study the motion of the Pacific and North American tectonic plates. From GPS data, students detect relative motion between the plates in the San Andreas fault zone--with and without earthquakes. To get to that discovery, they use physical models to understand the architecture of GPS, from satellites to sensitive stations on the ground. They learn to interpret time series data collected by stations (in the spreading regime of Iceland), to cast data as horizontal north-south and east-west vectors, and to add those vectors head-to-tail.Students then apply their skills and understanding to data in the context of the strike-slip fault zone of a transform plate boundary. They interpret time series plots from an earthquake in Parkfield, CA to calculate the resulting slip on the fault and (optionally) the earthquake's magnitude.

Measuring Ground Motion with GPS: How GPS Works
Shelley E Olds, EarthScope Consortium
With printouts of typical GPS velocity vectors found near different tectonic boundaries and models of a GPS station, demonstrate how GPS work to measure ground motion.GPS velocity vectors point in the direction that a GPS station moves as the ground it is anchored to moves. The length of a velocity vector corresponds to the rate of motion. GPS velocity vectors thus provide useful information for how Earth's crust deforms in different tectonic settings.

Reasons for the Seasons
Declan De Paor, Old Dominion University; Steve Whitmeyer, James Madison University
Reasons for the seasons (RFTS for short) is an interactive learning resource that leverages the popular Google Earth virtual globe. It is designed to help students and members of the public visualize and understand ...