This textbook is intended for undergraduate courses in Earth history. It was written by Callan Bentley, Karen Layou, Russ Kohrs, Shelley Jaye, Matt Affolter, and Brian Ricketts. It is a work in progress.
Free Open Educational Resources for the Geosciences. The landing page provides links to three textbooks designed for use with introductory courses in Physical Geology, Historical Geology, and Mineralogy. Content contained within each of these books can be utilized across many related courses. The text is written as much as possible at a high school level. Interactive content and quizzes are sprinkled throughout for a better student experience.
Students use computers to access the Paleobiology Database Navigator and Ron Blakey's paleogeographic maps (at "Deep Time Maps") to evaluate the timing of the buildup of the Isthmus of Panama (and the connection of the Americas). The activity requires a web browser, so students should be reminded to stay on task and only visit relevant websites. Googling images of the animals in question is fine (glyptodonts are very cool to contemplate, for instance), but no one should be checking Facebook. The instructor may wish to demonstrate how to narrow down the results in Navigator by taxon and time period - using examples not relevant to this activity's focus - Cretaceous and Tyrannosaurus, for instance. A tutorial is available online at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=db2He3p-Jco .
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Students will explore the different aspects of the carbon cycle on Earth. This includes the original source of all the carbon on our planet, the near ubiquity of carbon, the six principle reservoirs of carbon in the Earth system, and the movement (flux) of carbon between reservoirs. Students will approach the chemical history of carbon by personifying the "journey" of specific carbon atoms throughout geologic time.
The unit emphasizes the grand challenges of energy resources and climate change by grounding these issues in a solid understanding of carbon from a systems thinking perspective. The point here is for students to gain a more robust appreciation for the movement of carbon between atmosphere and geosphere, between hydrosphere and biosphere. The unit provides dynamic understanding of how perturbations to one sphere or changes in the amount of carbon in a given reservoir can have implications throughout the Earth system.
(Note: this resource was added to OER Commons as part of a batch upload of over 2,200 records. If you notice an issue with the quality of the metadata, please let us know by using the 'report' button and we will flag it for consideration.)
Students will be introduced to a few of the different methods used in paleoclimatology, including isotopic ratios as paleotemperature proxies. They will investigate the greenhouse gas connections of two ancient climate episodes, the cold "Snowball Earth" of the Neoproterozoic and the hot "Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum" (PETM) of the Cenozoic.
The unit emphasizes the grand challenges of energy resources and climate change by grounding these issues in an understanding of ancient climate from a systems thinking perspective. Students will gain a more robust appreciation for the record of the movement of carbon between atmosphere, geosphere, hydrosphere, and biosphere over geologic time, and how various components of the Earth system respond to those perturbations. The unit practices geoscientific habits of mind, such as comparing modern processes to ancient analogues recorded by geologic processes, as well as the importance of converging lines of evidence, and recognition of Earth as a long-lived, dynamic, and complex system.
(Note: this resource was added to OER Commons as part of a batch upload of over 2,200 records. If you notice an issue with the quality of the metadata, please let us know by using the 'report' button and we will flag it for consideration.)