The Polar Rock Repository at the Byrd Polar and Climate Research Center offers no-cost Rock Boxes for use by educators in both schools and informal learning environments, such as libraries, scout groups, and Science Olympiad teams. Each box may be borrowed for one month and contains more than 30 representative samples (rocks, minerals, fossils), printed materials for student use (books, descriptions, etc), teacher materials (also available online), and tools to examine the samples. With few exceptions, all of the samples in the boxes were brought back from Antarctica over the past century by U.S. expeditions!
A virtual version of the Rock Box may be viewed here. In addition to 3D models of rock samples, high resolution photographs and descriptions are linked.

In this laboratory exercise students will have an opportunity to examine the crystal structures, optical properties and health hazards of the common asbestos minerals. The laboratory will reinforce optical microscopic skills that students have learned in mineralogy and show them how mineralogy can be critical to understanding a current public policy issue.

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This short exercise refreshes students memories about converting chemical analyses to mineral formulas, and mineral formulas to oxide and element weight percents.

Students convert between formulae and weight percents, showing all work.
The problem set handout has enough introductory material for students to be able to complete the problems without any instructor lecturing or textbook reading.

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Students complete a crossword puzzle to review the physical properties of minerals that are helpful in hand specimen identification. Mineral names and characteristics are particularly well-suited for a crossword format. Two versions are provided, one at an introductory level and one for more advanced undergraduates. Instructor files provided are easy to customize.

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This short exercise introduces students to phase diagrams that have a eutectic and a peritectic. After learning about such phase diagrams, students answer questions about melt composition, temperature, cooling and melting, crystalization, and melt:crystal ratios.

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Students dissolve selected salts and other compounds in water, let the water evaporate for about three weeks, and examine the crystals that grow. Students then draw crystal shapes and discuss the experiment. Discussion can include why and how crystals grow from solutions, why some minerals dissolve well and others do not, concepts of symmetry, and crystal systems and point groups.

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Copper is an element that is essential to our technology and to our standard of living. Commonly, the copper is extracted from a variety of copper-bearing minerals that occur in veins. These fossilized fluid pathways record a complex set of geologic processes with non-linear couplings that are the products of hydrothermal activity associated with igneous intrusions (e.g. heat transport, mechanical fracture, mineral precipitation, permeability changes). By carefully examining a rock slab and its mineralogy, one can decipher the series of interrelated processes and their resultant impact on the final product.

Students set about to determine the relative age of veins by visual examination of the rock slab provided. Several generations of veins are recorded by different colors representing different minerals. Using cross-cutting relationships, they list the veins from oldest to youngest. Based on their color, they determine the sequence of minerals that fill veins. This provides an opportunity to review why color can be used to identify some minerals but not others. Once minerals are identified, their ideal chemical formula allows the percent copper in the mineral to be determined as well as the additional elements that must be present to form the mineral. The consequent change in mineral chemistry can be linked to the alterations in fluids flowing through the fractures by analysis of fluid-mineral equilibria on activity-activity (a-a) diagrams. For the more advanced classes, relevant thermodynamic data can be provided and students can write hydrolysis reactions and calculate the (a-a) diagram themselves.

Interpretation of the geologic history begins with the matrix and initial conditions and follows through rock fracture, fluid flow, mineral precipitation, evolving fluid composition, fracture sealing, pore-fluid pressure buildup, fracture, precipitation, etc. in a series of feedbacks. A feedback diagram can be provided and used as a base-map for interpretation not only of the sequence but changes to each reservoir, or students can be asked to draw the series of events and their reservoirs with the mechanisms of change. In the end, students understand the complex series of geologic processes that must come together in space and time to produce an ore-deposit that can be mined for our use. They also wrestle with the complications of reading the rock record and with the ambiguity of interpreting the interaction of various mechanisms that control the final product.

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Students will view fossils, sometimes with supporting illustrations, and answer questions about them via deductive reasoning. The exercise is highly interactive, with the instructor providing hints and helpful questions. The questions concern ways in which fossil preservation reveals information about things like what kind of organism the fossil represents, how that organism lived, and how the fossil came into being.

This activity is divided into two parts - 1) Using data from primary literature to calculate mantle potential temperature beneath a ridge and an oceanic island ("hotspot"). 2) Using the transition zone thickness observed beneath a "hotspot" (Hawaii) to analyze contributions from anomalous temperature and composition. In addition to the student activity sheets, an Excel key, instructor notes, and student handouts are included below.

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Gravels deposited as a result of continental glaciation are used to teach introductory-level earth-science students the application of the scientific method in a cooperative learning mode which utilizes hands-on, minds-on analyses. Processes that involve erosion, transportation, and deposition of pebble- and cobble-sized clasts are considered by students in formulating and testing hypotheses.

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This project is designed based on 21st century skills and to help students engage in, experience, explore and evolve science. As a part of the activity students create a digital poster (infographic) using free online websites, such as: Piktochart, Checkthis, Glogster, Infogram, Easelly, Visually. They are not allowed to use powerpoint, learning to use these websites is one of the objectives of the activity.
Students are provided information on Copyright protection and Creative Commons, Referencing and Grading Criteria of the digital poster.
Students are assigned one mineral and 1 rock from each category of igneous, sedimentary and metamorphic to describe on the digital poster.
Information provided in the textbook and power points such as physical and chemical properties ( included but not limited to: chemical composition, density, texture, color, etc.) and 1 or 2 images of each sample should be included on the poster. Also they are advised to add the most common uses of the samples or any other information that they find interesting, which they may find this information in class material or they may have to do a little research. If they use sources other than class material, they need to cite their references.

In preparation for this assignment, students have read a brief section in their textbook on the fossilization process as it relates to dinosaurs. In addition they will have had one lecture on taphonomy that briefly covers the processes that transpire from the death of a dinosaur until its discovery by a paleontologist. Students work in groups. Each group is given a quarry map of a dinosaur locality and no other information. The exercise is framed as detecive work, where the "scene of the crime" is represented by the quarry map. The objective is to gather clues to make an informed intepretation. Students can obtain additional clues, but to do so, they must formulate a hypothesis that can be tested by the information they seek. However, they only get to formulate 10 hypotheses. An untestable hypothesis wastes a potential clue. Once students have gathered all their clues, they are encouraged to discuss the significance. Students write up their own interpretation and its limitations individually. The exercise gives students practice with taphonomic data and both its potential and limitations; hypothesis formulation; and examining differing viewpoints as group discussions often lead to debates about what information would be most important.

In this series of exercises, a kind of reductionist approach is used to direct the students attention to specific characteristics of a variety of ball and stick models. Through a series of leading questions, students must focus on specific relationships and must rationalize these relationships according to the fundamental principles of crystal chemistry and crystallography. In this way, students will simulate and replicate the kinds of questions we would normally ask in our professional careers as mineralogists. This approach also addresses other major recommendations from Project 2061: start with questions about nature, and concentrate on the collection and use of evidence. Other questions ask students to make connections to basic chemistry (e.g. bond types, relative strength of bonds, bond angles), determinative mineralogy (most likely place to develop cleavage), analytical techniques (e.g. preferred orientations for X-ray analysis), and so on. The final reflection questions will allow students to "discover" Pauling's Rules, a much more effective learning strategy than simple memorization of these rules (commonly with little or no understanding on the part of the students).

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As the core activity of petrology portion of a mineralogy/petrology course, students cooperatively conduct petrographic and electron microprobe analytical studies on suites of Central Blue Ridge metamorphic rocks collected during class field activities. We make use of a remotely operable electron microprobe instrument at the Florida Center for Analytical Electron Microscopy (FCAEM) to conduct all analyses in class.

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Our remote access system permits students to interact with our electron microprobe and obtain visual information about the tasks performed by lab personnel. Students in a petrology class, for instance, can view backscatter-electron images of a particular sample, ask for specific points to be analyzed, and immediately see the resulting spectrum of characteristic X-rays. With this interaction, such an exercise is more much pedagogically effective. Our video streams mean that students do not need to know how to operate the instrumentation -- that is not the point for students in a mineralogy or petrology course. Instead, seeing a live backscatter-electron image or an X-ray spectrum from a point they chose catches the interest of students and allows them to make decisions while they learn about mineral associations. Many classrooms are now equipped with Internet connections and a computer with a projection system. As a result, a lecturer in such a classroom can project our video streams onto a screen or wall so that the entire class can observe the analysis of a sample. Lab rooms also often have internet-capable computers, so a small group of students could, on the phone, ask lab personnel to move to some point on a sample and examine a specific crystal.

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In this three-part exercise, students study hand samples and thin sections of light-colored igneous minerals and related mineral species.

Part one - Box of Rocks: Students examine a tray of minerals and record their physical properties, composition, and habit. They note chemical and physical similarities and differences and why there are several varieties of minerals in each group.
Part two - Definitions: Define a list of terms relevent to the lab.
Part three - Minerals in Thin Section: Observe minerals in thin section and answer questions about them.

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This is a series of 5 assignments I assign outside of class time, with the purpose of getting students to explore the literature resources that are available for mineralogy. The inspiration for the exercises comes from my exasperation with the repeated questions: "Why do we have to know so many minerals?" and "What about these minerals do we have to know?" Rather than saying "Everything that is important," I hope to show students that what they need to know depends on what questions they hope to answer, and that mineralogy developed in historical context, parallel with other sciences.

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Students read a short paper from the scientific literature on a narrowly focused mineralogical topic. Reading is guided by a 1-page set of questions and tasks, arranged in sequence with the paper, that make students look at the details of data, arguments, and conclusions. The tangible result is properly answered questions and typically some graphs, but the student gains a less tangible improved understanding of how to read scientific papers in general and an improved understanding of that particular paper in particular.

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This lab uses the remote operation of an Electron Probe Micro-Analysis (EPMA) available through the Florida Center for Analytical Electron Microscopy (FCAEM; https://fcaem.fiu.edu/), at Florida International University, Miami, to explore feldspar mineral chemistry. This lab explores detailed mineral chemistry, data normalization, and plotting compositional ranges on ternary diagrams suitable as an introductory assignment in a Mineralogy, Earth Materials, or Petrology course. This instructor-led interactive demonstration of remote Electron Microprobe use introduces students to microprobe analysis, x-ray analytical techniques, standardization, image analysis, normalization, mineral formulas and composition. The instructor can acquire images (optional) of samples containing feldspar (provided by FCAEM or instructor's samples) then select multiple points for analysis. This activity captivates student's attention and provides a hands-on instrument-led approach to introducing undergraduate students to chemical analysis and vital concepts in mineralogy and petrology.

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This exercise introduces students to the concept of temporal and spatial fidelity, to the different types of fossil assemblages, and how the taphonomic characteristics of an assemblage can be used to assess the relative state of fidelity. The exercise is suitable when introducing the discipline of taphonomy, typically covered near the beginning of a course in paleontology or paleobiology.

Because most universities lack appropriate collections of fossils, particularly collections from assemblages with unusual states of preservation, this exercise provides digital images of fossils from a Middle Devonian obrution deposit (or smothered assemblage) found within thin bedded limestones of the Hamilton Group of western New York State.

Students are asked to make predictions concerning the relative states of preservation likely to be found in life assemblages (biocoenoses) and death assemblages (thanatocoenoses and taphocoenoses). A biocoenosis is an assemblage that contains virtually all of the species that existed when the community was alive. A thanatocoenosis is a death assemblage where all the fossils represented existed within the community, but not all community members are present as fossils (species are missing). Finally, a taphocoenosis is an assemblage where not all species present in the community are represented as fossils, and not all the fossil species within the assemblage lived in the community (i.e., there is temporal or spatial mixing). Students are then presented with a PowerPoint presentation of the Hamilton Group strata, the limestones possessing the unusual fossil assemblage, and finally images of fossils with their preservational characteristics highlighted. The slides are annotated to provide observational descriptions and not interpretations. The exercise works best with students working in small groups with each group supplied with a laptop containing the PowerPoint presentation. Finally, each group is asked to interpret the assemblage type represented (bio-, thanato-, or taphocoenosis) and present a cogent argument citing supportive preservational evidence. (Because the assemblage is created through obrution, the assemblage is correctly interpreted as a thanatocoenosis â the fossils present were found within the community with many individuals preserved in life position and with behaviors represented; not all species in the community, however, are preserved as fossils.)

If time allows, students could be asked to make predictions concerning the preservational characteristics expected for each assemblage type in advance of the exercise. (A table is attached that I use to help frame their predictions.) Their interpretation and evidential argument could be written up as a short essay. I've asked students to do this individually and other times as a collaborative writing assignment for the group.

Once the correct assemblage interpretation is revealed to the students, they could be asked to speculate about the mechanism leading to this style of preservation (i.e., recognizing it as an obrution deposit). A few figures are provided that are helpful in explaining obrution.

The following files are uploaded as supportive teaching materials:
1. Discussion Assemblage Types.doc: Notes to guide a discussion to acquire predictions for taphonomic characteristics for each assemblage type.
2. Fossil Assemblages Exercise.ppt: PowerPoint presentation that describes the unknown fossil assemblage.
3. Exercise Assemblage Fidelity Assignment.doc: The handout provided students describing the exercise.
4. Obrution Deposits.ppt: PowerPoint presentation explaining obrution deposits.