This unit introduces high school students to climate change, the carbon cycle, and the effects of increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide on Earth's climate. Students create a model from string, toss bean bags, and sort chemical cards to review key processes in the carbon cycle. Then they quantitatively model the carbon cycle by playing a board game.

Explore geological wonders, firsthand. Visit an EarthCache and learn from the rocks under your feet. An EarthCache is a special type of geocache you can visit to learn a geology lesson developed by the community. This EarthCache is located on the Columbia College campus, in Columbia, CA. After completing this EarthCache, you will learn more about the geology under your feet here.

Spreadsheets Across the Curriculum module/Geology of National Parks course. Students study how discharge per unit area varies with elevation in the high country of Glacier National Park from USGS hydrograph data from Swiftcurrent Creek and its tributary Grinnell Creek..

Think-pair-share and jig-saw activity asking students to study and compare subsidence curves from different tectonic settings.

In this activity students synthesize ideas from lecture, reading, and viewing two PBS NOVA videos on hurricanes.

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The software package known as SHAPE (Shape Software 521 Hidden Valley Road, Kingsport, TN 37663) provides an excellent method for accurately drawing crystals. The following three boxes describe the basic steps involved in using SHAPE. Refer to these instructions when completing the exercises.

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The intent is to provide a map-based framework, complete with animations showing the geologic evolution of the area to be visited, so that students can then better appreciate the observations made at the various stops along the way and see how they each relate to the other and the big picture.

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This assignment is meant to illustrate how the advection of heat by groundwater leads to the elevated temperatures at shallow sedimentary basin margins at which Mississippi Valley-type Zn-Pb hydrothermal ore deposits are formed. The assignment is based on analytical solutions for groundwater flow and heat transport published by Domenico & Palciauskas (1973). Students use a spreadsheet to calculate and plot the flow field and temperature in a sedimentary basin, and to investigate the conditions needed to produce ore-forming temperatures. These results have further implications for the length of time available for ore formation and the concentration of metals and pH of the groundwater, which are also explored in the assignment. The assignment provides an example of how groundwater plays a fundamental role in an important geologic process in the Earth's crust. The activity also shows the linkages of hydrology to other disciplines such as heat transport, geochemistry, and economic geology.

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An interactive powerpoint presentation walks students step-by-step through the process of generating a Korjinski diagram for the system K20-Al2O3-SiO2. Students will use the triangular diagram from the previous exercise to determine which minerals have stability boundaries on the diagram. A second tutorial explains how to plot a natural water composition on the diagram. A Word document provides the thermodynamic data and instructions necessary to create their own diagram for the Ca0-MgO-SiO2 system. An answer key is also provided.

An interactive powerpoint presentation walks students step-by-step through the process of generating a triangular diagram for the system K2O-Al2O3-SiO2. A Word document provides the thermodynamic data and instructions necessary to create their own diagram for the CaO-MgO-SiO2 system. An answer key is also provided.
Students will:
- Calculate mineral compositions in mole percent and plot on a triangular diagram.
- Determine which is the stable mineral at the apices.
- Draw in all possible tie-lines connecting coexisting minerals.
- Eliminate unstable collinear phases.
- Eliminate crossing tie-lines.
- Determine stable mineral assemblages for bulk-rock compositions provided.

A quantitative skills-intensive exercise using data from the Mineral Mountains, Utah, to calculate mass balance and to address the "space problem" involved with emplacing plutons into the crust.

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This activity from the Astronomical Society of the Pacific asks students to compress all of time (from the Big Bang until now) into one year.
First, they have to pick major events (younger students can be given them) - this can lead to lively discussion! You can certainly be adaptable here.
Second, the best thing to do is have the students guess where each event should be on the Cosmic Calendar.
Third, have them look up or be given the actual time period when the event occurred.
Fourth, have them calculate (or be given) the "date" on the Cosmic Calendar.
Fifth, discuss! Debate! Reflect!

Files cannot be uploaded as they are copyrighted but they are easily found and freely available.
Authors: Therese Puyau Blanchard, Andrew Fraknoi, and the staff of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific
URL: http://www.astrosociety.org/edu/astro/act2/H2_Cosmic_Calendar.pdf

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Students are given two questions for each concept, in which they must (1) calculate the composition of minerals in weight percent given relative proportions of given end members and (2) calculate mole percentages for feldspars based on their mineral analyses (provided).

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This lab focuses on the identification of impact features, and how they can used to estimate the age of planetary surfaces. Key comcepts include understanding how the crater process has changed over geologic time; how those changes manifest themselves in the surficial record of planetary landforms; how other planetary processes modify surficial landforms; how the conditions of the Solar System have changed over time.

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Student groups create blogs or VoiceThreads on selected natural disaster events including a description of the event, the cause of the disaster, response & recovery, prediction & prevention and resilience to the event.

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As part of the Berkeley Museum of Paleontology site, this page provides general information about earth systems of the Cretaceous Period. The site contains text, supporting diagrams and links to more detailed resources concerned with plate tectonics and past climates. Specific topics covered in this site include the rifting of Pangea, global climate, appearance and diversification of angiosperms, end of Cretaceous extinction and Chicxulub impact.

Students receive a "Dear Colleague" letter requesting the review of a journal article in the same format as would be received from an Assistant Editor of a major scholarly journal. The letter outlines the requirements of the review and the due date. Students also receive the review forms typically provided by a given journal (I've provided forms from the Geological Society of America Bulletin and American Mineralogist for use in an upper division course in Mineralogy, Igneous and Metamorphic Petrology. The GSA Bulletin form is better suited for manuscripts that report on articles that have a significant field or tectonic component; the American Mineralogist form is better suited for articles that focus on more analytical, theoretical, or computational applications in mineralogy and petrology.

In an upper division petrology class, I typically select articles for review that integrate numerous aspects of topics we've recently covered in class; tectonic setting, field relations, petrography, whole-rock geochemistry, geo- and thermochronology, mineral chemistry (for PTt calculations), stable isotope geochemistry, etc. My goal is to help students see how these multiple lines of evidence must be integrated into a coherent geologic interpretation of geologic process or history.

Modify the letter with the request for review and review forms to emphasize the particular course goals, content, and expectations for your own course.

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This exercise is designed to help students understand relationships among external morphology of crystals (their shape and faces), internal structure (unit cell shape, edge measurements, and volume), Hermann-Mauguin notation for the 32 crystal classes, and Miller Indices of forms and faces.

The example and four crystal measurement problems have been drawn using the computer program SHAPE (see both Brock and Velbel, this volume). Both a single drawing and stereo pair are given for each problem. The stereo pair drawings can be used with the normal stereoscope used to read air photographs. The interfacial angles were calculated by the SHAPE program. If you have access to SHAPE you can design other crystal problems or have students generate the crystal drawing on the computer and then make the calculations ask for in this exercise.

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Students choose one of four short articles to read about mineral mining, including the impacts of mining on the Native American community in the region. Each article highlights a specific example where the Indigenous community's interests are in conflict with the mining company's interests. After reading one of the articles, students post a short reflection to a discussion board, then respond to at least one classmate's reflection.

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In this lab, students are introduced to the difference between relative and absolute dating, using the students themselves as the material to be ordered. Initially, the students are asked to develop physical clues to put themselves in order from youngest to oldest (exposing the inferences we make unconsciously about people's ages), and this will be refined/modified using a list of current events from an appropriate historical period that more and more of the students will remember, depending on their age (among other variables). Absolute age is introduced by having the students order themselves by birth decade, year, month, and day, and comparing the absolute age order to the order worked out in the relative-dating exercise, with a discussion of dating precision and accuracy.

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