This set of investigations focuses on the use of sedimentary facies (lithologies interpreted to record particular depositional environments) to interpret paleoenvironmental and paleoclimatic changes in Neogene sediment cores from the Antarctic margin. Particular attention is given to characteristics of settings close to the ice (ice-proximal) and far from the ice (ice-distal) in high-latitude settings. In Part 1, students build their knowledge of polar sediment lithologies and the corresponding facies through conceptual diagrams, geological reasoning, and use of core images and core logs (a graphical summary of the sediments). In Part 2, the core log for the entire 1285m ANDRILL 1-B core is presented. Students characterize each of the key lithostratigraphic subdivisions and use their knowledge of depositional facies to write a brief history of the Neogene climatic and environmental conditions in the Ross Sea region. In Part 3, students use their core log reading skills and facies knowledge to evaluate patterns in the Pliocene sediments from ANDRILL 1-B. They quantitatively correlate patterns in their dataset with cycles in insolation (incoming solar radiation), influenced by changes in the Earth's orbit during the Pliocene.

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Learn how scientists have pieced together a continuous 800,000-year record of atmospheric carbon dioxide levels and ocean temperatures in these videos from NOVA: Decoding the Weather Machine. Use this resource to review the difference between inference and observation and to consider the relationships between carbon dioxide, Earth's temperature, and climate change.

Using web-accessed climate data, students will examine the latitudinal distribution of CO2 and explain how (and why) that has changed over (recent) time. They will then work in groups of two or three to download, graph, and interpret carbon dioxide concentration data from one individual location (different groups will be assigned a different site). Each student will complete a series of questions to ensure their understanding of the concepts outlined above.

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Local changes in climate, flora, fauna, and the human population can be anecdotally explored through interviews with long time locals.

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SYNOPSIS: This lesson explores different transit systems around the world and unpacks the decision-making process behind transportation planning.

SCIENTIST NOTES: This lesson has students investigate what transportation planners do and the transportation systems of different countries. All external links are valid, and this lesson has passed our scientific review process.

POSITIVES:
-Students have the opportunity to collaborate and reason with each other.
-Students conduct research and present their findings orally.
-Students are exposed to global connections.
-Students activate creativity and imagination.

ADDITIONAL PREREQUISITES:
-This is lesson 3 of 6 in our 3rd-5th grade Green Transportation unit.
-Students should have prior knowledge of accessing information using the Internet.

DIFFERENTIATION:
-Teacher can modify the Investigate section through the following ways based on students' needs:
-Low Level: Teacher provides students with mostly visuals and/or audio recordings describing the different transportation systems and allows students to write keywords and share.
-On Level: Teacher provides students with a mix of visuals and brief sentences from articles describing the different transportation systems. Students can write 1-4 sentences to share.
-High Level: Teacher provides students with complete articles describing the different transit systems and allows students to highlight in the text. Students then write 5+ complete sentences prior to their sharing with the whole class.
-In the Inspire section, students have the option to work independently or in groups.
-If working in groups, students can choose the specific role that fits their personality the best.

Introducing Africa is comprised of two lessons and is designed to raise studentsĚ_Ě_´ awareness about stereotypes of Africa; teach them information about the history, geography, economics and cultures of Africa; and to give them an appreciation for the diversity of the African continent. This kit will teach students to identify important details, make logical inferences, and draw informed conclusions from visual documents including photographs and money. The lesson was designed for third grade but can be used with older students.

These three laboratory activities build student knowledge of anthropogenic global climate change through use of the Columbia University-National Aeronautics Space Administration (NASA) Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) Educational Global Climate Model (EdGCM). They are designed to build student proficiency with each of the major steps used in a climate modeling experiment. The goal is to build student climate modeling skills and knowledge of climate models to enable students to conduct their own climate change research using EdGCM.

Key Questions:
How do scientists research the impact of humans on the global climate?
How does global climate modeling differ from and rely upon the work of other physical scientists?
In what ways can the methods of climate science help us understand how our own lives impact the global environment?
What limitations does global climate modeling hold as a research tool for understanding and predicting anthropogenic global climate change?

Course syllabus relies on library ebook, Shawn Smallman and Kimberley Brown’s Introduction to International Studies, (University Of North Carolina Press, 2015).

Course Description:
International Studies is a multidisciplinary study of the major geographical, political, economic, social and cultural issues that dominate the international agenda. This is an introductory course to international studies where the contemporary and historical relationship between countries and complex global forces are analyzed. Several global issues, such as migration, security, food, health, and climate are the major topics to study the increasing global interconnectedness and the political, economic, and cultural globalization.

At the end of this course:
Students will acquire the foundational knowledge in the field of international studies.
Students will demonstrate an ability to think globally and use multidisciplinary perspectives to analyze global phenomena.
Students will be challenged to think critically about their own lives and their connection to other cultures, places and peoples in the world.

SYNOPSIS: This lesson introduces students to air quality.

SCIENTIST NOTES: The lesson introduces to students to basic knowledge on air quality and how it is interpreted using the AQI. This lesson is void of any scientific misconceptions. Thus, it is recommended for classroom use.

POSITIVES:
-Journaling is great for students to reflect and explore how they feel about air pollution.
-Why Is Coco Orange? is a great book for students to build empathy for those with underlying health conditions.

ADDITIONAL PREREQUISITES:
-It may be best to split students who read the book and students who watch the read aloud video. Perhaps these two groups can use two separate spaces if possible.
-Students will use these journals throughout this entire unit. Students could create new journals or use journals that they use all year or for different subjects.
-"Air pollution" is kind of a catchall term, referring to things like ozone, particulate matter, and even greenhouse gases. This can be tricky for elementary students to sort out. The purpose of this lesson is for students to learn that breathing in the pollutant ozone is harmful to their health.

DIFFERENTIATION:
-You can have students complete the KWL chart in groups instead of a whole class. One student can act as the scribe while the group discusses.
-You can assign students to read the book or watch the read aloud video, depending on their strengths and weaknesses.
-You can provide sentence stems for weaker students when they are journaling. For example, if they select option #1 - written reflection - you can provide them with the following sentence stems:
-Today I learned that...
-I am thinking...
-I am feeling...

This Open Educational Resource was designed to provide a four-field introduction to anthropology for undergraduate courses. This course was created through the cumulative efforts of the Department of Anthropology at IUP as a reflection of their teaching and experiences as a collective.

As instructors of both undergraduate and graduate students alike, the professors in the Anthropology Department hope that students use this book to further their knowledge and understanding of anthropology and apply it in their everyday lives and the world around them.

IUP's Introduction to Anthropology: A Holistic and Applied Approach to Being Human is a 4-field text designed to provide students and instructors with a quality, peer-reviewed free resource that depicts a diversity of perspectives, approaches, and topics related to sociocultural anthropology, biological anthropology, archaeology, and linguistic anthropology.

Consisting of a robust series of 20 modules, the IUP OER covers topics from the history of North American anthropology, cultural and archaeological methods, the origins of humans and our earliest ancestors, the development of agriculture, race and ancestry, sex and gender, kinship, religion, climate change, and human rights and social issues—providing faculty flexibility with topics covered in a typical 15-week semester.

Designed to help students engage more meaningfully with each topic and develop as critical thinkers, the OER includes:

review and assessment questions
discussion prompts
class activities
relevant videos
glossaries
suggested readings
allowing students to dive further into topics no matter their preferred method of learning.

We are proud to host an interactive, digital version of the OER, created through the Articulate platform. We are also rolling out a physical version of the text, published through Amazon's KDP (stay tuned for the link).

Authored by the faculty in IUP's Department of Anthropology, this OER arose from a commitment to provide high-quality resources to all students. We combined the best aspects of our introductory course and teaching to create a robust resource that can be used in any introductory, 4-field anthropology course. Our own applied experiences are integrated into the course materials, as well as those from a range of professional anthropologists (isotopes and kinship studies, indigenous archaeology, forensic anthropology and the race problem, medical anthropology, and a linguistic anthropological analysis of food and power relationships in the prison system, among others!). The result is a resource that provides multiple lenses to tackle common introductory topics while showing students the myriad possibilities of what it looks like to be an anthropologist. Contact us for a LMS package to integrate the course into a Learning Management System.

Senior Authors:
Andrea Palmiotto
Lara Homsey-Messer
Benjamin Ford
Amanda Poole
Abigail Adams
Francis Allard
William Chadwick

Other Contributors
Allysha Winburn, University of West Florida
Alexander Martín, Center for Comparative Archaeology, University of Pittsburgh
Desireé Reneé Martinez, Cogstone Resource Management
Jelmer Davis, University of California, Davis
Anastasia Hudgins, Ethnologica
Sandhyak Narayanan, University of Nevada, Reno
Rachel Horowitz, Washington State University
Lori Labotka, Knoxville, TN
Bridget Roddy, IUP
Ashley Nagle, IUP
Sonja Rossi-Williams, IUP

This OER was made possible through grants from PA GOAL and the IUP Center for Teaching Excellence.

The course aims at providing a fundamental understanding of the physics related to buildings and to propose an overview of the various issues that have to be adequately combined to offer the occupants a physical, functional and psychological well-being. Students will be guided through the different components, constraints and systems of a work of architecture. These will be examined both independently and in the manner in which they interact and affect one another.

In this sophomore design course, you will be challenged with three design tasks: a first concerning water resources/treatment, a second concerning structural design, and a third focusing on the conceptual (re)design of a large system, Boston’s Back Bay. The first two tasks require the design, fabrication and testing of hardware. Several laboratory experiments will be carried out and lectures will be presented to introduce students to the conceptual and experimental basis for design in both domains. This course was based in large part on the Fall 2005 offering of 1.101, developed by Prof. Harold Hemond.

Short Description:
This book describes how Earth's climate is changing, how it has been changing in the recent geological past and how it may change in the future. It covers the physical sciences that build the foundations of our current understanding of global climate change such as radiation, Earth's energy balance, the greenhouse effect and the carbon cycle. Both natural and human causes for climate change are discussed. Impacts of climate change on natural and human systems are summarized. Ethical and economical aspects of human-caused climate change and solutions are presented. Data dashboard

Word Count: 52328

(Note: This resource's metadata has been created automatically by reformatting and/or combining the information that the author initially provided as part of a bulk import process.)

This is an introductory course on computational thinking. We use the Julia programming language to approach real-world problems in varied areas, applying data analysis and computational and mathematical modeling. In this class you will learn computer science, software, algorithms, applications, and mathematics as an integrated whole. Topics include image analysis, particle dynamics and ray tracing, epidemic propagation, and climate modeling.

This class uses revolutionary programmable interactivity to combine material from three fields – Computer Science + Mathematics + Applications – creating an engaging, efficient learning solution to prepare students to be sophisticated and intuitive thinkers, programmers, and solution providers for the modern interconnected online world.
Upon completion, students are well trained to be scientific “trilinguals,” seeing and experimenting with mathematics interactively as math is meant to be seen, and ready to participate and contribute to open source development of large projects and ecosystems.

Introduction to Earth Science is a 530+ page open textbook designed to provide a comprehensive introduction to Earth Science that can be freely accessed online, read offline, printed, or purchased as a print-on-demand book. It is intended for a typical 1000-level university introductory course in the Geosciences, although its contents could be applied to many other related courses.

This text includes various important features designed to enhance the student learning experience in introductory Earth Science courses. These include a multitude of high-quality figures and images within each chapter that help to clarify key concepts and are optimized for viewing online. Self-test assessment questions are embedded in each online chapter that help students focus their learning. QR codes are provided for each assessment to allow students using print or PDF versions to easily access the quiz from an internet-capable device of their choice.

Adapted from openly-licensed works in geoscience, the sequence of the book differs from mainstream commercial texts in that it has been arranged to present elementary or foundational knowledge regarding rocks and minerals prior to discussion of more complex topics in Earth Science. Unlike prominent commercial texts for Earth Science, this book dedicates an individual chapter to each of the three major rock types, the processes of mass wasting, geological time, Earth history, and the origin of the universe and our solar system. Book content has been further customized to match the Pathways General Education Curriculum at Virginia Tech with a focus on Student Learning Outcomes (SLOs) for Pathways Concept 4, Reasoning in the Natural Sciences.

Are you a professor reviewing or adopting this book for a course?
Instructors adopting or reviewing this text are encouraged to record their use on this form: https://bit.ly/interest_intro_earth_science. This helps the book's sponsors to understand this open textbook's impact.

How to Access the Book
This text is available in multiple formats including PDF, a low-resolution PDF which is faster to download, and ePub [coming mid 2023]. These are available at: https://doi.org/10.21061/introearthscience. The book is also available in HTML/Pressbooks at https://pressbooks.lib.vt.edu/introearthscience. Softcover print versions with color interior are available at the manufacturer’s lowest price at https://www.amazon.com/dp/1957213361. The main landing page for this book is https://doi.org/10.21061/introearthscience.

PDF: ISBN 978-1-957213-34-7
HTML/Pressbooks: ISBN 978-1-957213-33-0
https://pressbooks.lib.vt.edu/introearthscience
Print: ISBN 978-1-957213-36-1 https://www.amazon.com/dp/1957213361
ePub: ISBN 978-1-957213-35-4 [expected mid 2023]

Table of Contents
1. Understanding Science
2. Plate Tectonics
3. Minerals
4. Igneous Processes and Volcanoes
5. Weathering, Erosion, and Sedimentary Rocks
6. Metamorphic Rocks
7. Geologic Time
8. Earth History
9. Crustal Deformation and Earthquakes
10. Mass Wasting
11. Water
12. Coastlines
13. Deserts
14. Glaciers
15. Global Climate Change
16. Energy and Mineral Resources
17. Origin of the Universe and Our Solar System

Find, Adapt, and Share Resources
If you wish to share resources you build from this book or find those shared by other adopters of this book, please join the Instructor Resource Portal in OER Commons at https://www.oercommons.org/groups/introduction-to-earth-science-instructor-group/12785

Attribution
This work includes content from multiple sources reproduced under the terms of Creative Commons licenses, Public Domain, and Fair Use. Specifically: Chapters 1-16 are adapted from An Introduction to Geology https://slcc.pressbooks.pub/introgeology (CC BY NC SA) by Chris Johnson, Matthew D. Affolter, Paul Inkenbrandt, and Cam Mosher. Chapter 17 is adapted from Section 22.1 of Chapter 22 “The Origin of Earth and the Solar System” by Karla Panchuk in Physical Geology, 2nd edition (CC BY) by Steven Earle https://opentextbc.ca/physicalgeology2ed/part/chapter-22-the-origin-of-earth-and-the-solar-system, with Sections 7.1, 7.2, 7.3, and 7.4 of Chapter 7 “Other Worlds: An Introduction to the Solar System” https://openstax.org/books/astronomy-2e/pages/7-1-overview-of-our-planetary-system from OpenStax Astronomy, 2nd edition https://openstax.org/details/books/astronomy-2e (CC BY). And, figures are from a variety of sources; references at the end of each chapter describe the terms of reuse for each figure. Version notes located at the end of the book describe author changes made to these materials by chapter.

About the Author
Laura Neser, Ph.D. is an Instructor in the Department of Geosciences at Virginia Tech. Dr. Neser earned her B.S. in Geosciences at Virginia Tech in the spring of 2008 and completed her Ph.D. in Geological Sciences at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC) in 2014. Her doctoral research focused on the structural geology, sedimentology, and stratigraphy of formations that were deposited along the flanks of the Beartooth Mountains as they rose during late Paleocene-Eocene time. Dr. Neser has worked as an athletic tutor and online instructor at The University of North Carolina (Chapel Hill, NC), in temporary positions as an Adjunct Instructor at Chowan University (Murfreesboro, NC) and Full-Time Lecturer at Indiana State University (Terre Haute, IN), and as a Professor at Seminole State College (Sanford, FL) before starting as an Instructor at Virginia Tech in the fall of 2021.

Although she is currently focused on teaching online sections of Introduction to Earth Science, Earth Resources, Society and the Environment, and Climate History, her teaching background is significantly broader and includes Environmental ‬Science, Astronomy, Environmental ‬Ethics, Earth History, Structural Geology, and Field Geology‬.

Suggested Citation
Neser, Laura (2023). Introduction to Earth Science. Blacksburg: Virginia Tech Department of Geosciences. https://doi.org/10.21061/introearthscience. Licensed with CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0.

Report Errors: https://bit.ly/report_error_intro_earth_science
View Errata: https://bit.ly/errata_intro_earth_science

Funding and Project Support
This publication was made possible in part through funding and publishing support provided by the Open Education Initiative of the University Libraries at Virginia Tech.

Accessibility Statement
Virginia Tech Publishing is committed to making its publications accessible in accordance with the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990. The Pressbooks (HTML) and ePub versions of this text are tagged structurally and include alternative text, which allows for machine readability.

Disclaimer
This work may contain components (e.g., illustrations, or quotations) not covered by the license. Every effort has been made to clearly identify these components but ultimately it is your responsibility to independently evaluate the copyright status of any work or component part of a work you use, in light of your intended use. Please check the references at the end of each chapter before redistributing.

This is the first of nine lessons in the Visualizing and Understanding the Science of Climate Change website. This lesson is an introduction to Earth's climate and covers key principles regarding Earth's unique climate, atmosphere, and regional and temporal climate differences.

Introduction to Energy and Earth Sciences is an introduction to microeconomic fundamentals with a focus on the applications of economics to energy and environmental markets. We will introduce the economic method of analysis to the environmental and resource questions facing society. We will learn about the market forces, supply and demand and how they are formed from two concepts of law of Diminishing Returns and Diminishing Marginal Utility. We extend our knowledge by exploring factors such as market dynamics and market equilibrium, government intervention and market power. At the end we will apply these concepts to real life examples and address Climate Change and Carbon Policy, Resource Scarcity and Energy Security, and Changes in the Electricity Business.

Through an overview of some of the environmental challenges facing the growing and evolving country of China today, students learn about the effects of indoor and outdoor air pollution that China is struggling to curb with the help of engineers and scientists. This includes the sources of particulate matter 2.5 and carbon dioxide, and air pollution impacts on the health of people and the environment.

Students are presented with examples of the types of problems that environmental engineers solve, specifically focusing on air and land quality issues. Air quality topics include air pollution sources, results of poor air quality including global warming, acid rain and air pollution, as well as ways to reduce air pollution. Land quality topics include the differences between renewable and non-renewable resources, the results of non-renewable resource misuse and ways to reduce land pollution. (Water quality is introduced in a later lesson in a separate presentation, as it is the focal point of this unit curriculum.)