Discovering Plate Boundaries (DPB) is a data rich exercise to help students discover the processes that occur at plate tectonic boundaries.  DPB has been used with students from 5^th grade to university level.  It works well over this wide range because it requires the students to observe and classify data.  It does not require prior knowledge of plate tectonics.  The exercise is built around global data maps.

Note: This is not an activity but rather background information on types of volcanoes. It can be modified.

See Also - Hawaii and Indonesia – Activity and Information for Students

Background

Part I: Overarching Question: What is the relationship between the motion of the Pacific plate and that of the Hawaiian hot spot over the last 70 million years?

See also: Teaching About Volcanoes in a Plate Tectonic Context

Begin by examining a map of Hawaii that shows the entire volcanic chain including the Emperor Seamounts (http://pubs.usgs.gov/gip/dynamic/Hawaiian.html is one nice example).

This exercise was developed as a collaborative effort by the faculty in the Department of Geoscience.

The major source of power for industrial use, the home, and transportation comes from burning fossil fuels including petroleum, natural gas and coal.  To a lesser extent, wood and peat are also burned as a source of power but these two sources are less commonly used and neither accounts for a major fraction of the fuel used world wide.

An understanding of climate science and the processes that control Earth’s past, present and future climate is increasingly important for students both as potential scientists and as future decision-makers in our society. Before students can begin grappling with the concept of anthropogenic climate change, they must build the necessary vocabulary and background knowledge for participating in meaningful discussion about the natural climate system.

Central Pennsylvania is an area rich in natural energy resources with a complex geologic history. Classroom investigations often focus on how the modern regional topography developed following formation of the Appalachian Mountains. The last ten years have seen tremendous interest in utilizing natural gas, especially from the Marcellus Shale, as an alternative to coal and petroleum for providing electricity and transportation fuel.

Using real-time or near-real-time data in the classroom can form the basis for exciting guided inquiry lessons that build necessary scientific thinking skills. Choosing data from recent newsworthy events also motivates students to learn because they feel personally connected to the observations surrounding such events.

The ability to visualize features of the Earth in three-dimensional space, and to conceptualize how these features change over long timescales, is a crucial skill for geoscientists. Here I present an exercise that is specifically designed to build geometrical visualization skills while exposing students to authentic real-time data.

The lesson explores the idea of a SuperMoon and is designed to demonstrate that the Moon’s orbit around the Sun is not circular but elliptical.  

Instructions and Image files for the Super Moon activity are included below as word and pdf files.

For this exercise, students utilize a Google Earth file to explore three different sets of Wonders of the World: The Ancient Wonders, the Modern Wonders, and the New 7 Wonders. Included is a student workshop with short-answer questions for the various sites and some summary questions that require students to pull information from across the exercise.