Pasta Quake: Exploring Earthquake Magnitude part of EarthScope ANGLE:Educational Materials:Activities
Paul Doherty (Exploratorium Teacher Institute) and Roger Groom (Mt Tabor Middle School) with improvements by ShakeAlert
This short activity provides an intuitive introduction to earthquake magnitude using an everyday item--spaghetti. Learners are introduced to the earthquake magnitude scale by breaking different amounts of uncooked noodles. Visual scale of the pasta emphasizes the relative differences between magnitudes with each whole step in magnitude. For older students, the demonstration helps students understand why seismologists use the nonlinear logarithmic scale to best graph the huge range of quantities.

Unit 5: How do earthquakes affect society? part of Imaging Active Tectonics
Bruce Douglas, Indiana University-Bloomington; Gareth Funning, University of California-Riverside
Unit 5 is a final exercise that can start during a lab period and carry over into work outside of the lab time. The project report will test students' abilities to synthesize and apply knowledge related to ...

Unit 1: "If an earthquake happens in the desert and no one lives there, should we care about it?" [How are human-made infrastructure lifelines affected by earthquakes?] part of Imaging Active Tectonics
Bruce Douglas, Indiana University-Bloomington; Gareth Funning, University of California-Riverside
This unit initiates a discussion about the importance of recognizing faults in relation to modern societal infrastructure. Students consider the types of infrastructure necessary to support a modern lifestyle, ...

Unit 3: How to see an earthquake from space (InSAR) part of Imaging Active Tectonics
Bruce Douglas, Indiana University-Bloomington; Gareth Funning, University of California-Riverside
How can we tell what style of faulting was responsible for a particular earthquake? Especially in cases where there is limited instrumentation in a region, or where geologists have difficulty accessing the affected ...

Unit 4: The phenomenology of earthquakes from InSAR data part of Imaging Active Tectonics
Bruce Douglas, Indiana University-Bloomington; Gareth Funning, University of California-Riverside
How are different types of earthquakes represented in InSAR data? How can we obtain detailed information on the earthquake source from InSAR data? How well can we resolve those details? In this unit, students ...

Unit 2: Identifying faulting styles, rates and histories through analysis of geomorphic characteristics (Lidar) part of Imaging Active Tectonics
Bruce Douglas, Indiana University-Bloomington; Gareth Funning, University of California-Riverside
Can active faults be identified remotely, based upon their appearance in the landscape? How can the geomorphic features associated with active faults be used to classify and quantify fault movement? In this unit, ...

Signal processing and earthquake triggering part of Teaching Computation with MATLAB:Teaching with MATLAB 2015:Teaching Activities
Jackie Caplan-Auerbach, Western Washington University
In this exercise, written for an undergraduate seismology class, students use MATLAB to analyze waveforms from the 2004 Sumatra M9.0 earthquake, as they were recorded on three seismic stations in Alaska. Two of ...

Unit 3 Hazards at Divergent Plate Boundaries part of Living on the Edge
Rachel Teasdale, California State University-Chico; Laurel Goodell, Princeton University; Peter Selkin, University of Washington-Tacoma Campus
Students work in small groups to examine data and videos of earthquakes, submarine volcanic eruptions, and black smokers at submarine divergent plate boundaries, and then predict similar processes at subaerial ...

Unit 1 Hazards at Transform Plate Boundaries part of Living on the Edge
Laurel Goodell, Princeton University; Peter Selkin, University of Washington-Tacoma Campus; Rachel Teasdale, California State University-Chico
This unit uses scientific data to quantify the geologic hazard that earthquakes represent along transform plate boundaries. Students will document the characteristics of the Pacific/North American plate boundary in ...

Unit 4 Risk at Divergent Plate Boundaries part of Living on the Edge
Laurel Goodell, Princeton University; Rachel Teasdale, California State University-Chico; Peter Selkin, University of Washington-Tacoma Campus
Volcanoes typically give warning that they are coming out of dormancy and entering an eruptive phase. Being able to recognize those warning signs and take appropriate actions (e.g. evacuations) are important ...