This activity is a field investigation where students will increase their knowledge of SE MN geology including rock layers, fossils, and Karst topography. They will also learn how Karst Geology impacts our water quality.

A field investigation to the Mawikwe Bay Sea Caves of northern Wisconsin along Lake Superior in the winter. Students will investigate deposition of sedimentary rocks and weathering of the rocks to produce sea caves.

This activity is a interdisciplinary field investigation where students will form observations and make calculations about stream characteristics and stream flow.

This activity is a field investigation where students will observe the topography of Big Stone Lake and generate questions about the history of this area.

This activity is a field investigation where students gather data on rock types and geologic formations to construct a geologic column that will help them to interpret the geologic history of the Cannon Falls area.

This observational inquiry activity involving careful descriptions of rocks and fossil including age will be used to create a scalar accurate geologic time scale. Students will observe and learn that the geologic time scale was created based on changes in fossil, rock, and atmospheric changes.

This activity is a field investigation where students make observations in the Minnesota River valley, discuss their findings amongst other student groups, and describe how those observations fit with the general geology of Minnesota.

Students will make observations of weathering on different rock types in a cemetery. Students will also make observations of rock types of the Minneopa Falls.

This activity is a lab inquiry-base lesson on the rock cycle. Students will look at the parts of the rock cycle by examining three rocks. Based on their observations and data they collect they should be able to develop a hypothesis and an experiment to test this hypothesis.

This activity is a quantative writing activity where students will use writing and illustrations to show their knowledge of the basic rock cycle.

This activity is a field investigation where students go out to a water source and observe erosion that has taken place.

This model-making activity gives students an opportunity visualize Newtonian forces acting on a single point as well as combined forces acting to produce synclines and anticlines in Earth's crust. Students will analyze models to interpret findings of plate movements.

This activity is a combination of a field investigation and direct instruction at Minnehaha Falls. We are investigating Twin Cities rock types and weathering from the flowing water.

This activity is a field investagation where students will discover answers to their questions about the rock cycle.

This experiment uses the heating of water to explore the concepts of density and volume. Students learn about the transfer of heat energy within the atmosphere, hydrosphere, and Earth's interior, and connect this transfer to differences in density, which in turn result in motion. As part of the investigation, students will also become familiar with the Celsius and Fahrenheit temperature scales.

Students will write a matlab code to calculate crustal thickness of 5 locations. Calculations will use topography (determined by running a matlab script that creates a clickable map) and nominal density values, and the assumption that the crust is in airy isostasy. Students will then run another script (with clickable map) to determine the actual crustal thickness of the locations. If the calculated and actual thicknesses are significantly different, students will discuss possible geodynamic reasons for the non-airy crustal thicknesses.

In this activity, students organize a set of fossils chronologically and learn to correlate, based on fossil evidence, the stratigraphy of one location with that of an adjacent location. Earth Science Reference Tables are used to identify the epoch of occurrence and the age of each of the fossil specimens. Students will become familiar with the concept of index fossils and understand what makes a good index fossil.

The goal of this lab session is to introduce you to the spindle stage and its possible uses in an undergraduate mineralogy lab. A spindle stage is a one-axis rotation device that mounts on a polarizing microscope and is used to aid in the measurement of optical properties of single crystals. At the undergraduate level, it can be used to identify minerals and to demonstrate the relationships among grain shape, retardation, and interference figures. A natural extension of these uses is undergraduate research on the optical properties of minerals.

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Short Description:
In this class, students will explore diverse topics in the geosciences at a high level. Students who complete this class will have had the opportunity acquire the skills needed to engage in advanced geologic study.

Word Count: 30933

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This textbook is a comprehensive lab manual for the core curriculum Introductory Geosciences classes with both informational content and laboratory exercises. Topics include basic laws and theories in Geology, the Earth's interior and plate tectonics, water and climate change, igneous rocks and volcanoes, and earthquakes.