Geology

When at the edge of the Grand Canyon, use care, or . . . .

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I retired from the Moravian College faculty in 2009, so the pages below describe the geology course and the facilities for geology only prior to the summer of 2009. Please see the Physics and Earth Science Departmental web site for the current descriptions.

Click here to see the major in Geology, the minor in Earth Science, and the interdepartmental major in Earth Science (all prior to summer, 2009). Click here to see the Earth Science classroom.

The 2009 catalog description of the course:
Earth Science 110: Introductory Geology
Earth processes and their effects on the materials, structure, and morphology of the Earth's crust;  laboratory includes field work, computer simulations, and study of minerals, rocks, aerial photographs, and maps. Spring semesters.  Three 50-minute periods and one 3-hour laboratory per week.

The syllabus for the most recent semester when I taught the course is available as a Word document. All my syllabi in all the courses that I taught during my entire career were printed on both sides of only a single sheet of paper.

Field Trips and Google Earth (both to 2009).
Three geology field trips investigated the geological structures and surface morphology of the local region. A Geology Field Trips Tour for all three trips can be viewed from above by copying the attached Google Earth Geology Field Trips file. (Instructions: After downloading and saving the file, just change the extention from ".zip" to ".kmz" and save it. The file does not need to be unzipped. Then just run it.) This file will run the Google Earth program, provided you have previously installed this free Google Earth program from the Google web site. The Geology Field Trips Tour will be available in the menu list to the left of the screen.

The topographic map review is available and contains example topographic maps and example photographs. Many of the example topographic maps and many of the accompanying photographs represent features found within the area local to Moravian College. I took all the photographs within the topographic map review. Many of these photographs, but perhaps not all, were used as examples in the lecture portion of the Geology course.

The videos, films, and animations that may have been shown during the course have links on this page and can be viewed only from networked computers on campus.

The following computer simulations had been available to all students in the computer laboratory and the computer classrooms:

    Drifting
    Drillbit
    Erupt
    Seismic Eruption
    Seismic Waves
    ArcGIS (ArcView 3.2, ArcGIS 9.1, and ArcExplorer)

The Earth Science classroom contained two active seismometers within the room, and six additional ones in the basement beneath it. Moravian College was a Educational Affiliate with the Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology (IRIS). The IRIS web site (http://www.iris.edu) contained information about recent earthquakes and the earthquake education and outreach program plan.

Geomusic was a Word document list of music that had geological references. The geomusic list was compiled the old-fashioned way -- by individuals looking at titles within their music collections.

Gerencher's geological slides.

External links to interesting geological websites.

My favorite geological poem.

A collection of geology videos was maintained in the Moravian College library.

The geology program had benefited from donations of supportive materials and mineral, rock, and fossil collections.

 

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. . . you will have a long, long climb back out.