Geonarrative Case Studies: Surface Hazards

Introductory undergraduate geoscience courses, including general physical geology or earth surface hazard courses. This could also be used in an environmental earth systems course.

Students will need a brief introduction of the hazard associated with their assigned geonarrative.
This could be in the form of a textbook reading, lecture materials, or independent research on the part of the students.

This can be completed as a standalone exercise. However, this may also be completed after the other modules created as part of the CLaSH cascading land surface hazard activities available on Teach the Earth.

Students will identify environmental factors contributing to land surface hazards in the given region. They will describe downstream impacts of land surface hazards, including modifying the likelihood or magnitude of additional hazards, environmental quality impacts, or social and economic impacts.

Students will synthesize information from the geonarratives to identify relationships between environmental variables and develop a concept sketch illustrating these relationships.

Students will summarize and synthesize data and information in written form and create concept sketches to illustrate their understanding. They may be asked to work in groups or orally communicate their answers to other groups or the whole class.

In this activity, students will navigate to one of the USGS "geonarratives" pages focusing on land surface hazards in a specific region. Students will read through the geonarrative and answer the questions, either in groups or individually.

As the teaching notes indicate, you can assign everyone in the class the same geonarrative, break students into groups covering different assigned geonarratives, with the potential of doing a jigsaw-style share-out during class. Or you can let students choose themselves.

Here is a list of potential geonarratives to use:

• Hurricane Florence response
• Cameron Peak Fire, Flooding and Debris Flows
• Coastal Change in Alaska
• Liquefaction and sea level change San Francisco
• Raleigh erosion hotspots
• North Carolina Island Erosion
• Columbia River Gorge Landslides
• Elk Fire Postfire Flooding and Debris Flows
• Turkey Earthquake

Student Handout for Geonarrative Case Studies (Acrobat (PDF) 364kB Jul1 26)

There are several excellent mechanisms for choosing the geonarrative to focus on:

1. Choose one that is geographically close to your class, 
2. Choose one that describes a hazard common in your region,
3. Choose one that is particularly difficult for your students to understand without a concrete real-world example,
4. Choose several focusing on different hazards, and have students work on them in groups. Then, do a jigsaw-style activity in which an "expert" on one geonarrative will teach students who became "experts" on other geonarratives.
5. Allow students to choose the geonarrative that they find most interesting. Please note that if you choose this option, you'll need to be sure you have covered all the possible hazards in class, or that students have resources they can utilize to get good information to supplement the geonarrative reading. There may also be some geonarratives that align with student handout questions more than others.

This activity could be completed in class or as a take home assignment. Either way, a class discussion is recommended to promote synthesis of ideas and reflection. If completed in class, we recommend incorporating group work throughout in addition to a reflection at the end of the activity, particularly for the concept sketch.

We highly recommend teaching this activity in conjunction with the "Modeling Dynamic Earth Systems" lesson to illustrate how students can turn their concept sketches into dynamic systems models. If that lesson is introduced first it will provide clear expectations for the concept sketches they are asked to draw for this lesson.

While we have described this as a good faith completion activity, we use the concept sketches drawn by students as focal points for discussion afterward, which leads to formative assessment of earth systems interactions as related to land surface hazards.

Link to geonarratives:

• Hurricane Florence response
• Cameron Peak Fire, Flooding and Debris Flows
• Coastal Change in Alaska
• Liquefaction and sea level change San Francisco
• Raleigh erosion hotspots
• North Carolina Island Erosion
• Columbia River Gorge Landslides
• Elk Fire Postfire Flooding and Debris Flows
• Turkey Earthquake

Link to additional CLaSH curricula:

• Hazard Exploration Activity