Welcome to the Processes & Concepts of Geology course at The College of Wooster. This is the "web syllabus" of the course which will be used by students (and anyone else who is interested) throughout the semester. Each week I will add links to other pages we will use in lecture and lab. I will usually just be a week ahead, since links can change rapidly in this business. If you have any suggestions for this page, please send me an e-mail message. It is a delightful course to teach, and I hope it is enjoyable to take as well. For the course specifics, please see the notes at the end of this page. Our course material will be supplemented by lectures from visiting speakers in our Geology Department Seminar Series, the webpage for which you will also want to visit often for additional information and relevant links.

Mark A. Wilson

Department of Geology

The College of Wooster

Wooster, OH 44691 USA

mwilson@wooster.edu

Return to Geology Course Pages

Schedule of Lecture and Laboratory Sessions

(With Weekly Links to Other Web Resources)

 

Lectures in Scovel Hall Room 116, Monday, Wednesday and Friday, 10:00 - 10:50 a.m.

Lab Sessions in Scovel Hall Room 116, Tuesday and Thursday 2:30 - 3:50 p.m.

Web Resources for Week #1:

The beautiful planet Earth: its history and how it works. What an extraordinary topic! We will start with a general overview of Earth, including its construction and its position in the Solar System. (Try this very cool Solar System Simulator from NASA for unusual perspectives on the planets and moons.) We will then keep moving outward with a review of our Milky Way galaxy and then the Universe itself (or Universes, depending on your cosmological tastes). How did it all begin? We'll be mutually astonished once again with the prevailing scientific theory of the Big Bang. (And just to be fair and balanced, as they say, take a look at this page where someone insists the Big Bang is wrong. My friends the Creationists are even more upset about the Big Bang. Serious cosmology is guaranteed to make many people unhappy.) It can all be a bit much, of course, but our generation is fortunate to have Stephen Hawking to help it explain it in vivid terms as experienced on this PBS website. You can round out your initial tour by looking at the websites of the course pages in Wooster's Geology Department. I can't think of a better way to demonstrate the diversity and wonder of the topics ahead of you. Welcome!

Geology in the News:

There are two stories out on two clever ways scientists have hypothesized when humans first started wearing clothes. One is in the Washington Post and the other in The New York Times. One involves the DNA history of lice and the other the genetics of skin color. How would have guessed this was open to discovery? It appears that clothing is only a few tens of thousands of years old, and that Neanderthal was a hairy one.

The Venus Flower Basket sponge will soon be a familiar one to paleontology students. It has recently been discovered that its glassy fibers are as good or better than man-made fiber optics at transmitting light. Copying these natural properties is part of a new field called biomimetics.

I hope you've been watching the wonderful planet Mars this month -- we have our best view of it in nearly 60,000 years. Look for it in the late evening southern sky. You can miss its orange, steady glow.

NASA has launched a powerful infrared telescope into space as the last of its orbiting "great observatories". I hope we are talking about what it tells us by the end of this semester.

The hole in the ozone layer over Antarctica may reach its largest size yet this year. This means that skin cancers will inevitably increase in the next few years. don't forget your sunscreen!

Web Resources for Week #2:

Minerals and igneous rocks are well represented on the Web. Most pages are boring lecture outlines, but there are a few exceptions. For example, this set of mineralogy course webpages from Colgate University is superb. Think defining a mineral was easy? Check out this set of mineral defintions. The Mineral Gallery will not only sell you virtually any mineral you want, but they have spectacular images. The Museum of Mineralogy in Paris and the Smithsonian Institution also have excellent on-line displays of minerals, rocks, meteorites and gemstones. When you're ready to see igneous processes in action, head for the United States Geological Survey Cascades Volcano Observatory for many volcanic images and links. Here is a 15-second QuickTime movie of the eruption of Popocatepetal Volcano in Mexico. Finally, the ultimate web mineral site is actually called WebMineral. You can find virtually anything you want when it comes to minerals and mineralogy here, including hundreds of excellent photographs.

You asked about the properties of diamonds this week in lab. This link will answer just about anything you can think up about the gems, including whether they are combustible, their atomic structure, and so on. Too bad our own experiments would be so expensive!

Here is the key for Quiz #1. These keys will be posted soon after the quizzes are administered. (Want to try some simple little geology web quizzes? They're multiple choice, so you know you've reached a university and not a college site!)

Geology in the News:

You just have to see the latest Hubble space telescope photographs of Mars, which is closer to us now than it has been for 60,000 years. Absolutely spectacular. Read how the Hubble can in many ways make better images than spacecraft orbiting Mars.

Glaciers near Los Angeles as recently as 5000 years ago? That is what a geological study of Mount San Gorgonio seems to show. As usual with studies like this, the glaciation is not the issue -- the dating of the glaciation is. They need Dr. Wiles to sort this out for them!

Next month a consortium of European countries will launch a space probe to study the Moon, including whether it has water. This device will give us more information about the Moon's origin. Surely, though, the Europeans can't do this as well as we can?

Web Resources for Week #3:

The first page I'd like you to visit for an introduction to sedimentary rocks is our own College site for the Sedimentology & Stratigraphy course. Plenty of links there to all sorts of fun sedimentological places. For example, Georgia Perimeter College has a page with a detailed summary of sediments and sedimentary rocks. Here is a neat interactive diagram of typical siliciclastic depositional environments, courtesy of the University of British Columbia. Clicking on terms in the drawing takes you to photographs of Cretaceous rocks which represent them. This popular Geology of the Grand Canyon will also give you a perspective on the accumulation of sediments over time, and introduce you to our topic next week.

Here is the key for Quiz #3. You did fairly well. We'll talk about it in class.

Geology in the News:

If you want to read a scenario of the end of Earth and Mars 7.5 billion years from now, then try the link. First the expanding Sun melts our crust and the upper mantle, and then glaciers of magnesia .... Somehow I don't care. We will have had a good run.

An earthquake 3.9 in magnitude shakes the Bay Area in northern California. 3.9? This is news? They must be going soft there in my home state.

Was there a "Second Genesis" of life on Mars? There is absolutely no evidence there was ever life on Mars, but that doesn't stop some theorists from spinning tales of all sorts of crazy possibilities. Surely "astrobiologists" should find something else to do until they learn if their field even exists. Might as well study UFOs.

Studying geysers which erupt only irregularly is difficult, as you can read in this article from Newsday. There is much yet to learn about the magmatism underneath the soil of our own country.

Remember the ambitious goal of physicists to have a Theory of Everything? They aren't even close, but we wish them well!

An astrobiologist, Richard Hoover, is studying archaea in "extreme environments", such as in the waters of Mono Lake, California. Dr. Hoover is a prominent advocate of the idea that some meteorites contain microfossils, and so this work with modern organisms is in part a test of the durability of life. I am not convinced by the evidence that any meteorite contains any fossils, but you can tell from this article that there are heated debates about the idea. The concept of life in space is an extraordinary one, and it will take extraordinary evidence to support it.

Web Resources for Week #4:

We'll start this week catching up with an introduction to metamorphism and metamorphic rocks. For a glorious taste of igneous and metamorphic rock textures, including spectacular thin-section images, visit the Atlas page from the University of North Carolina. Here is a nice illustrated lecture on metamorphic rocks from Georgia Perimeter College.

For an introduction to geologic time and stratigraphy, you cannot beat these pages from the University of California at Berkeley. Please refresh your memory of the Geologic Time Scale as soon as you can. Here is a nice little test you can take on the Web. Columbia University has an especially good discussion of geologic time and the concepts behind its description and measurement. Remember that geologists make a critical distinction between relative time and absolute time, which is usually calculated radiometrically. Radiocarbon dating is a special case of radiometric dating. The details on these methods will come much later in this course.

Geology in the News

Black holes make a celestial sound, in an odd sort of way. "Deep B-flat, 57 octaves below middle-C" is the sound made by the energy emitted by a black hole, according to astronomers analyzing data from the Chandra X-Ray Observatory. This may explain some of the "ripples" seen in the material around black holes.

Dark matter is in trouble. This is one of my favorite concepts in astrophysics, that there is invisible matter exerting gravitational forces throughout the Universe. Now scientists are beginning to question this concept which came from "the late 20th Century". (I hate it when they talk about the recent past that way!) So far dark matter is still allowed to exist, but it may not be as pervasive as we thought.

Coral reef cover in the Caribbean appears to be down about 80%, according to a recent study. (The article does not say 80% from when. Let that be a lesson to you.) This is an extraordinary drop. The debate is now about how much humans have to do with it. Quite a bit, I suspect.

This is sort of geology: an ancient tunnel in Jerusalem has been dated to Biblical times by using uranium isotopes in stalactites and carbon-14 in plant remains. If only other Middle Eastern problems could be solved so easily.

Web Resources for Week #5:

There are not many exciting webpages on stratigraphy, but I can at least send you to sites which review the principles we covered in class last week. Here is one from the University of Wisconsin. From Georgia Perimeter College is a page on the age of the Earth and another on radiometric dating. And of course, everyone should visit the homepage of the International Commision on Stratigraphy.

We are well set for links to the wonderful world of fossils on the web. Please refer to Wooster's History of Life course page (familiar to many of you already) and our Invertebrate Paleontology course page. Some of these links may no longer be valid (the courses were taught last semester), but most still work. For the hardcore paleontologists among you, try a visit to the Paleontological Society homepage.

Ryan wanted to know how creationists who believe the Earth is about 6000 years old explain the geological record which so plainly shows us that our planet is 4.5 billion years old. First I can send you to another of my course pages, this one on geology and creationism. You'll find plenty to intrigue you there. You may also want to see this long page on the age of the Earth from a creationist viewpoint. You will note that many creationists are very good at sophistry and pseudoscientific rhetoric.

Here is the key to Quiz #5. Good luck on Friday's test! Here's a sample test from my last class.

Geology in the News:

Here's an article on that "buffalo-sized rodent" found in the Pleistocene of Venezuela. It is a distant relative of the guinea pig, but I suspect that is really a public relations ploy to catch our attention. (As if a 1500-pound rodent isn't enough.)

It is not really geology, but interesting nonetheless: a lost pre-Columbian civilization has been found in the jungles of the Amazon by careful satellite imagery and exploration. These finds are changing ideas about the history of this part of South America.

Four giant squid washed up dead on the shores of Spain, and the Spanish Navy is being blamed. These are the largest invertebrates alive today, and they are still quite mysterious.

Oh I will miss the spacecraft Galileo, which has showed us so much of the Solar System. It is scheduled to be intentionally crashed into Jupiter on Sunday.

A new cousin has been found! Xenoturbella is a "mud worm" from the bottom of a Swedish fjord (not a "lake") which apparently evolved from the same flatworm ancestor we did. This creature was once thought to be a mollusk (you'll later learn why), but a DNA study revealed its true relations.

Web Resources for Week #6:

The deformation of rocks produces such interesting images. The first place you want to visit is the website for our own Structural Geology course, taught by Dr. Bob Varga. He has a nice set of structural images on this site. Another extensive set of structural images can be found at this website maintained by our friends at Smith College.. For some general large-scale images, look at this beautiful digital landforms map of the United States, and then visit the Color Landforms Atlas of the USA, where you will find superb maps and satellite photographs of each state. Our job as geologists will eventually be to explain why the land looks as it does. We will not neglect seafloor topography, as demonstrated in this ocean bottom map from the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). For closer topographic detail, and a hint of this week's labs, visit this expandable image of Sunbury, Pennsylvania, with its folded rock sequences. The San Andreas Fault is well illustrated on this page, which has a fascinating map system for identifying locations. You can finish your geological deformations web tour by examining the cool 3-dimensional salt tectonics images on this University of Texas page.

I recently found "A Geologist's Lifetime Field List", which is a fully-illustrated compendium of places and sites every geologist should eventually see. There is a well-known geological quotation: "The best geologist is the one who sees the most rocks". It may not be strictly true, but it makes some sense. Inspiring! What am I doing in this office!!

Geology in the News:

A huge earthquake of magnitude 8 struck Japan on Friday. Hundreds of people wee injured, but remarkably there have been no deaths reported. You, of course, know why there are earthquakes in Japan, and what it means when geologists report that the focus was 26 miles beneath the ocean floor.

Carbon dioxide emissions could be increasing the acidity of the oceans, with dramatic effects on marine ecosystems. This is particularly a problem, of course, for those marine animals with calcium carbonate shells. This is all based on computer modelling, though, so I am not very concerned ... yet. I also wonder if projecting current rates of industrial emissions for 1000 years makes much sense.

DNA studies show that people are more closely related to dogs than to mice. That is good news for us, but probably not for dogs. They may have more medical experiments in their futures!

The Milky Way galaxy is eating up the dwarf (and now shredded) Sagittarius Galaxy. Somehow I'm just a little bit proud of our handsome galaxy in this interaction.

Assignments:

Web Resources for Week #7:

We have been using Plate Tectonic theory from our first day in class, so central is it to geology. This week we begin to look at the concepts in detail, starting with their history. There are hundreds of pages on the Web dedicated to general plate tectonic theory or some applied aspect of it. Let's start by returning to this wonderful little spinning globe showing the ages of ocean crust. Note the pattern of progressively older crust as we move away from the spreading centers. The best introductions to plate tectonics I've found on the Web are those from Volcano World and the University of Nevada at Reno. You may also find useful this page from Northern Arizona University on continental reconstructions through Earth history. The images and data are of professional quality. These animated plate tectonic reconstructions are also well done. We will have even more plate tectonic links next week.

Here is the key to Quiz #7.

Geology in the News:

The surface of Saturn's moon Titan may be covered by hydrocarbon lakes. It is a complicated story involving crashing comets and very cold conditions, but you can bet that our friends the astrobiologists have gotten their thumbs in here to point out "prebiologic" chemicals.

A human lower jawbone was found in a Romanian cave and dated to between 34,000 and 35,000 years old. (Why couldn't they have mentioned the dating technique?) The size of the teeth and other features may indicate interbreeding between humans and our close cousins the Neanderthals.

Every scientist should know about the yearly awarding of IgNobel Prizes. Last week ten awards were given. Someday the judges will find my papers about little holes drilled in shells 450 million years ago and I will at last be famous.

For some reason one of our class question topics has been diamonds and their structures. You might therefore like this little story about the Hope Diamond and its mysterious glow in ultraviolet light. (If you remind me, I'll show you some other minerals which glow with a "black light".)

Two people were slightly injured and several houses burned when a meteorite fell on an Indian village. This is bad, of course, but I'd love to see a meteorite fall!

Web Resources for Week #8:

We start our second section of plate tectonic theory with a discussion of convergent margins. Subduction zones and their dynamics are covered well on this introductory website. The University of Leeds in England also has a nice subduction website with many simple illustrations. Sonoma State University in California has a field trip to an ancient subduction zone, complete with outcrop photographs of features such as pillow lavas and peridotite. "Kinds of Convergence Zones" is a graphics-intensive and informative page from the University of Oregon. This University of Tokyo tectonic interpretation of the 1999 earthquake in Taiwan has an excellent set of graphics demonstrating the precarious geology of that island on top of a subduction zone. Much of the island is an accretionary prism and thus inherently unstable.

Ever wonder how the Creationists explain plate tectonics? They do a terrible job, although it looks technicially proficient to the unschooled. My favorite: runaway subduction. Here is a quick and effective critique of this strange idea. Here is a more technical response: "Either Baumgardner's theory can be evaluated in terms of current physical constants, in which case it is falsified by present day heat flow measurements, or it is to be evaluated in terms of an inhomogenous mixture of current physical constants and arbitrarily invoked miracles, in which case it is nonscientific and beyond the range of even potential empirical falsification." Runaway subduction is an example of the kind of beliefs which result when you develop your conclusions before your arguments.

Geology in the News:

OK, frogs and plants are not invertebrates, but here is a cool evolutionary story anyway about the adaptations they make in response to their predators and the defenses of the organisms they rely upon. We will talk at the end of the course about this evolutionary escalation.

"The biggest fish ever found". It is a Jurassic Leedsichthys, found in an English quarry which I've mucked about in (and I only collected a few muddy oysters). The fish was a planktivore, despite its enormous size. Its mouth had an enormous gape.

New tiny little raptor dinosaurs in Australia! (I admit it -- there are not too many news stories this week about invertebrate fossils.) These are Cretaceous coelurosaurs. Why don't Ordovician bryozoans get the same press attention?

Spider silk in Cretaceous amber! I finally found some invertebrate paleontology news, even if it is a couple months old. It is not the most exciting story (I've had no doubts about the abilities of Cretaceous spiders to spin silk), but it does have some photos.

Web Resources for Week #9:

We continue our discussion of modern plate tectonics theory by finishing our study of convergent margins (see links for last week) and starting an analysis of plate motions. Strangely enough, for such an esoteric topic, there is an excellent website explaining Euler Poles. Linked to this Northwestern University site is a nice page on the use of GPS data to plot the uplift of the Andes. Note the diagram which includes the Foreland Thrust Belt. Try this plate motion calculator from Japan. For more technical information, click to this site on plate motions and crustal deformation from the American Geophysical Union. As we finish our section on plate tectonics, you may want to remember the practical part of this science by visiting the USGS recent earthquake page. It is a useful site to bookmark.

Our field trip will be to Caesar Creek Lake on Saturday. You'll love the extraordinary fossils you are going to see and collect. We'll talk about this more in class and lab.

Geology in the News:

Appropriate for this week is this article about the octopus eye and attempts to mimic it in techinology. The "o-retina" is designed to act like the octopus visual system and essentially make decisions without humans present. The marvelous intelligence of an octopus is also part of the story.

The Lowell Observatory and the Discovery Channel are going to build a $30 million dollar telescope to search for meteors and asteroids. It will be the nation's fifth largest. I like the idea of a science entertainment company actually advancing science.

Glaciers in southern South America are melting twice as fast as before, another worrisome indicator of global warming. Some of these glaciers are in Patagonia, a place I will be next month, if you can believe it.

A strange purple burrowing frog was recently found in India. It represents a new frog family which "dates back to Gondwanaland". A new animal family is most unusual, especially a new vertebrate family.

Despite millions of dollars spent on it, rain-making doesn't work. Period.

The Universe is shaped like a soccer ball. For awhile we thought it was shaped like a saddle, and then a sphere. Now it may have twelve pentagonal parts and still be expanding. I'll let you know what next week's theory is.

Web Resources for Week #10:

The Big Bang Hypothesis is an extraordinary concept. The origin of the Universe -- from nothing to everything. A good, albeit short, explanation of Big Bang ideas can be found at "Stephen Hawking's Universe", and another much more extensive set of resources at "Hot Big Bang". Want an artist's view of the Big Bang? For you humanities majors, how about Big Bang Philosophy? You can ponder many universes beyond the Big Bang with Stephen Hawking. And it wouldn't be the web without a site like "The Big Bang is Wrong!" For those of you looking for a simple redshift explanation, click away.

This star formation site is very good, but also very technical. Here's a planet formation site with good "artist's conception" images and a movie you can download.

Meteorites are critical to our understanding of the early solar system. Martian meteorites are rare and special because they are rocks blasted from the surface of Mars. Some have claimed they show evidence of ancient life, but the evidence is very weak.

Here's a news article, with updates, on that solar storm Merritt mentioned in class on Friday. It did not turn out to be much of a problem for our electronic systems.

On Thursday at 11:00 a.m. you have the dubious pleasure of listening to me yet again. I will be talking about some geological work I did in Israel this summer to the Geology Club. Here is a nice photographic album of the geology of Israel. I worked with the En Yorqe'am Formation in the Negev Desert. Here is a simple map of Israel for orientation.

Here is a sample second test in this course. Remember that your test on Friday will be different in content.

I promised you an article on the purported "Martian fossils" from the late 1990s. No one except a few of our astrobiologist friends accepts these as any sign of life.

Geology in the News:

Those of you who have had Sed/Strat will remember methane hydrates. An old idea that melting hydrates in seafloor sediments could produce giant gas bubbles that can sink ships has been revived. I don't believe that it has ever happened.

A massive ocean census is revealing that thousands upon thousands of marine species remain undescribed and unnamed. A million more species could be added to the lists by 2010. I am not at all surprised. Biodiversity will continue to astound us all.

Atlantic clams showing up in Pacific waters? Apparently they got there as discarded bait or restaurant food. This transplantation of exotic species produces tremendous ecological problems. Sometimes we even purposely introduce foreign species to combat another species from abroad. For example, Asian beetles are being released to eat the nasty Asian tamarisk tree which is choking western US waterways. I predict that the beetles will eventually bring their own problems.

Sphenodontian reptiles, which today are represented only by the lonely tuatara, have been found in the Argentine Upper Cretaceous. This changes some ideas about the history of this group and the rise of lizards.

Web Resources for Week #11:

Now this is cool. I'm writing these paragraphs from my hotel room in Seattle. I'm using an old web-writing program, so the links may not work in the same way, but still, the idea of posting from across the continent is fun. Hello to you all! I hope Merritt's leg is better. Thanks, Ryan, for taking the test to him.

We talked about it last week, but you might want to add NASA's main Mars page to your bookmarks.

This week we will discuss the origin of the Earth's atmosphere. You can get a preview of this topic, and several others, on this page about the "Earth's first 3.7 billion years", courtesy of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in New York. The "Volcano World" website has a short page on the volcanic origin of the Earth's earliest atmosphere, and California State University at Long Beach has a longer lecture page on atmospheric evolution. If you want Quicktime movies of volcanoes, this page is for you.

As you consider your schedule for next year, remember that several geology courses have syllabi and other relevant materials posted on our website.

Geology in the News:

The original Piltdown Man specimens are now redisplayed at The Natural History Museum in London. This article says that we still don't know who the hoaxer was behind this famous fraud, but my colleagues at the NHM are certain it was Martin Hinton. He had the means and the motive. There was a "practice kit" found in Hinton's trunk a few years ago, but it is strangely missing from this article.

Paleontologists have recently x-rayed pterosaur skulls to reveal details about their brains and ears, which are keys to their particular modes of hunting and fishing. Pterosaurs were sophisticated flyers who survived long after birds appeared. They died out with the dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous.

Cosmology! You've got to love it. So many Very Large Questions, including whether there is just one universe or "zillions", and whether life was inevitable or we "just got lucky". Read this article for the latest. Somehow I found this most recent discussion to be humbling.

Web Resources for Week #12:

As we finish the Precambrian, check out: The Growth of Canada. It is a slide show illustrating the Archean and Proterozoic development of the Canadian Shield. You will find familiar now the discussion and illustration of continental accretion and greenstone belt formation.

One week can hardly do justice to the geological and biological history of the Paleozoic, but that is why we have the History of Life course! I would start your web trip with a stop at the University of California, Berkeley, Museum of Paleontology Paleozoic page, which will give you lots of basic information and links. This nice image shows the diversity of life through time. You tell me what the language is! Note especially the Permian extinction. You could then go to specific cases, such as the Burgess Shale fauna, the Permian reef complex in west Texas, and the excellent "History of Palaeozoic Forests" website. We will talk about all these issues in class, but without the detail.

Geology in the News:

Sedimentology does not often make it to the news, but here's a story about examining past hurricane patterns by looking at cores through coastal sediments. If you read the article carefully, though, you'll find that the best chronological data for hurricanes comes from isotopic studies of corals.

There is a call at the federal level for a major new program to study the oceans. This is not a surprise to any scientist. So much of our future is tied to oceanic ecology and resources.

Evidence has emerged that an earthquake off the coast of Washington in 1700 generated a tsunami that caused a fatal shipwreck in Japan. Calculations from the size of the tsunami appear to show that the earthquake had a magnitude of 9.0, making it one of the largest ever. I'm glad there wasn't a second occurrence when I was in Seattle last week!

Research on the origin of life continues. There have been some exciting new developments, including the observation that clay minerals could have served as catalysts for early organic reactions.

Web Resources for Week #13:

This class seems to be ending so quickly! I know summer is near when the Mesozoic appears in our course. The Berkeley pages will give us excellent introductions to the Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous. You may also appreciate the Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous pages from the Peabody Museum at Yale University. "The Real Jurassic Park" is a lecture notes page from Lamont-Doherty which is very good, especially for a look at the famous Morrison Formation in western North America. "Oceans of Kansas" (great name) is devoted to Cretaceous fossils of the Western Interior Sea. For dinosaurs, try The Dinosauricon with its many resources, including links.

Think you know the Paleozoic now? Take the on-line test from Dr. Pamela Gore at Georgia Perimeter College. It's a wimpy fill-in-the-blanks test, though.

Our creationist friends at Answers In Genesis, the premier group of young-earth creationists in the world, are now complaining that evolution is winning in the public school systems. In the marketplace of ideas, special creationism, with its belief that the Earth is only 6000 years old, has proven to be a loser.

Geology in the News:

There is a thoughtful essay in a recent New York Times entitled, "Does Science Matter?". Every scientist and hope-to-be scientist should read it. The authors state well the opportunities, dangers and dilemmas facing scientists of the future.

Here's an article on ichthyosaurs which starts with the discovery of an ichthyosaur with a toothache! I had no idea that any marine animal could get cavities like we do, let alone an extinct reptile group. The story has more interesting materials and links about the world of the ichthyosaurs.

The BBC has a fine set of pages on recent ideas concerning the Piltdown Man Hoax. The first page has a three-dimensional bust of Piltdown that you can spin until he's dizzy, and it has a nice little movie. Read their list of suspects and tell me that Martin Hinton is not the one!

On November 19 the Leonid Meteor Shower peaks over North America. I hope the skies are clear enough for us to see it this year.

Web Resources for Week #14:

It is always nice to start with Berkeley's stratigraphy pages. The set for the Cenozoic is especially good. Here is a nice animation of the Tertiary and Quaternary west coast of North America, complete with the development of the San Andreas fault system. This West Coast tectonics page from Tanya Atwater of the University of California, Davis, is more detailed. For information and reconstructions of the Ice Ages in the midwestern United States, visit the Illinois state museum system. For the East Coast, take a look at this page on the Chesapeake Bay impact crater of 35 million years ago.

Geology in the News:

The National Science Foundation has funded an extraordinary multi-year project called EarthScope. It involves a deep borehole into the most active region of the San Andreas Fault, an array of GPS receivers along the San Andreas to detect even the tiniest movements, and a phalanx of seisometers which will move across the country, slowly accumulating detailed information about the structure of the continent. We will be hearing much from this project in the next few years.

Our friends the astrobiologists are planning a massive expedition to Jupiter's moons to search for life. These moons probably are the most likely places to find unEarthly critters. I don't think they'll find a living thing, but the planetary geology will be fascinating.

Web Resources for Week #15:

There is not much to say for this shortened week except that the geology of Argentina is very cool! Your previous links cover the material we will discuss on Friday.

Geology in the News:

A rare earthquake struck the Virginia-Washington D.C. area this week. It occurred in a "quiet section" of the Earth's crust, reminding us that no place on our plant is ever "quiet" for long.

Auroras have been "officially" sighted very high in the Earth's atmosphere -- higher than they are "supposed" to be. The interesting part of this story is that astronauts reported this very phenomenon years ago, but were dismissed by scientists because it was not possible.

Possibly the world's oldest marsupial was discovered recently in 125-million-year-old rocks in China. This is yet another marsupial fossil which throws into disarray our neat story of the groups origins and dispersal. It used to be so easy.

OK, you've all heard this story, so I have to include it for historical reasons: The oldest penis ever discovered has been found on a 425 ma ostracod. The technique for discovering these soft parts is a better story than the penis itself (are we surprised that ancient ostracods had penises?), but at least some invertebrate paleontology made it into global news!

Welcome to Processes and Concepts of Geology, probably the most diverse course in the Geology curriculum. Each of you has had at least one course in geology, and I assume you have registered for Geology 200 so that you can explore the science beyond the introductions. There is no other course like this in the world. Processes and Concepts of Geology is a combination of the traditional "physical" and "historical" geology courses with a strong emphasis on the conceptual roots of the discipline. By the end of this course you will not only have learned how the Science of the Earth works, but also how to develop and test geological hypotheses. Instead of simply passive recipients of scientific information, you will become scientists. (Junior scientists, of course, but scientists nonetheless.) Processes and Concepts of Geology is the gateway to the advanced geology courses; it is also a superb way to complete a distribution in the sciences.

We meet for the lectures and the labs in Scovel 116. You will see that this is an advantage because lab and lecture is often intermingled in geology courses. The lectures will be illustrated discussions of fundamental geologic topics. I will expect you to have read the appropriate sections in the textbook before the indicated lectures (see the reading schedule in the lecture syllabus above). Some of our topics are not covered in the textbook; you will receive special reading assignments for those.

The laboratory is designed to first help you with observational skills important to geologists, and then give you a series of exercises to work through as scientists. The important issues will usually not be your final answers, but the methods you used to reach them and the evidence you cite in their support. Each of you will also complete a laboratory project of your choosing which will enable you to work with geological specimens and departmental equipment to answer some interesting question.

We have a required field trip through parts of northeastern Ohio on October 25 (a Saturday). Our actual itinerary will depend on the weather, but you can count on a chance to bang rocks with a geologic hammer, collect a few fossils, and see some of the primary evidence used to reconstruct Earth history.

There will be two lecture examinations (September 26 and October 31). These will consist almost entirely of short- and long-answer essay questions covering the material in the preceding section. The final examination will be similar, with a couple comprehensive questions covering general concepts you have learned in the course. Throughout the semester (in lecture and lab), I will administer ten-minute "pop" quizzes. There will be 12 of these quizzes, with the lowest two grades dropped. These quizzes are designed to both reinforce concepts and information we have recently covered and to give me information on your levels of understanding. Quizzes cannot be "made up" for any reason -- if you miss one, it is a zero (which is why you can drop your lowest two scores). Occasionally I will collect the preparation questions and count them as quizzes.

Each week I will post a new appointment schedule and sign-up sheet on my office door. If you have questions, comments, problems, or just want to talk, please do not hesitate to make an appointment. You may sign up in any empty time slot. It will be a busy semester for us all, and I tend to look even busier than I am, but you are first priority.

Monroe, J., and R. Wicander. 2001. The Changing Earth: Exploring Geology and Evolution. Third edition. Brooks/Cole, the Wadsworth Group, 733+ p. [Readings are listed in the lecture outline above as "M&W".] Please bring this book with you to class and lab. There will also be occasional special readings assigned for the lectures.

Please sign up for the "InfoTrac" web subscription service provided with each textbook. Please also install on your computer the CD housed inside the back cover. I'm not sure yet HOW we will use these things, but we will!

Aaron House, a senior Geology major, is our teaching assistant this semester. Aaron will primarily assist in the laboratory and serve as a tutor for this course. He can be most easily reached in the Scovel third floor student carrels (extension 2812).