Blog

A new paper by me and education expert Bridget Mulvey grapples with the question: analogue sandbox models are cool, but are they effective teaching tools? Analogue models are a way of demonstrating tectonic deformation processes in the classroom: the weirdness of physical scaling laws means that slowly squeezing and stretching a tub of sand produces faults and folds like those produced in the crust over geological timescales. After building a sandbox model for some research, I wanted to use it in my classes, but the results…Continue Reading “New Paper: an innovative cycle-based learning approach to teaching with analog sandbox models”

This semester I was teaching a large in-person section of our general education physical geology course, ‘How The Earth Works’, for the first time since Spring 2020. In this class students earn 20% of their overall grade for ‘participation’. Pre-pandemic, this was earned by completing activity sheets during class and handing them in at the end of class. The activities were typically a series of questions exploring a key concept being introduced in the day’s class. I would give them some time to fill them…Continue Reading “Returning to large in-person classes – now with added polls and reflections!”

Congratulations to Lucy Dyer for successful defending her MS thesis, ‘Identifying marine magnetic anomalies using machine learning‘. Abstract Magnetic reversal boundaries identified from marine magnetic surveys are used to date the oceanic lithosphere and are a key source of information for reconstructing oceanic ridge spreading rates and past plate motion. However, the identification process is tedious and time consuming, which results in incomplete and inconsistent reversal identification along ridge systems and between ocean basins. This study investigates the feasibility of using machine learning to automatically…Continue Reading “Congratulations to Lucy Dyer for a successful MS thesis defense!”

Congratulations to Chenjian Fu for successful defending his MS thesis, ‘Global Paleomagnetic Data Analysis: Improved Methods of Reconstructing Plate Motions Using Paleomagnetic Data‘. Abstract Paleomagnetic Apparent Polar Wander Paths (APWPs) are the principal means of describing plate motions through most of Earth history. However, there are limitations to paleomagnetic data such as the poorly-constrained longitudes of paleo-plates and the degrading quality and density of paleomagnetic data with increasing age. Yet comparing the spatio-temporal patterns and trends of APWPs between different tectonic plates is important for…Continue Reading “Congratulations to Chenjian Fu for a successful MS thesis defense!”

For the first time in a while, I attended the Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union, to reveal the results of my first foray into education research: The motivation for this study was simple. I had used my sandbox model in my Tectonics and Orogeny class before, and although the students had clearly enjoyed running experiments on it, I wasn’t sure how much they had really learned from it about geological structures and how they develop. There had to be a better way, and…Continue Reading “AGU 2019 Poster: do analogue sandbox models help students to visualise geologic structures and deformation?”

Over the past few months I have been experimenting with possible educational uses of 3D printing1, in two main areas: Terrain models The online TouchTerrain tool makes it easy to generate .STL files of bits of the Earth’s surface, which can then be easily loaded into a slicing tool that turns it into instructions for the 3D printer. I have a number of ideas for creating comparative models, to give students a tangible idea of the relative scale of different geological features and events. For example, you can…Continue Reading “Adventures in 3D printing”

One of the key themes in my early research career was trying to understand the magnetic signature of rocks where the primary remanence was not carried by iron oxides like magnetite, but instead iron sulphides, particularly greigite. Studies of sediment cores made it clear that it could form relatively early during diagenesis. But my PhD research in New Zealand showed it could also form very late in diagenesis – sometimes during tectonic events millions of years after the host rock had formed. Frustratingly, the combined…Continue Reading “New Paper – Signatures of Reductive Magnetic Mineral Diagenesis From Unmixing of First‐Order Reversal Curves”

3.8 billion years! 4 billion years! 4.4 billion years! 4.57 billion years! When discussing the age of the Earth in introductory geology, I think it is important for students to know at least the basic principles of where these ages come from. That means explaining radiometric dating, which is consistently a challenging concept for students to get their heads around. This year, my attempts to come up with more useful ways to illustrate radioactive decay led me to code some simple visualisations in Python. I…Continue Reading “Simulating radioactive decay”

As a follow-up to his presentation at the GSA Northeastern/North-Central meeting in the Spring, KSU undergraduate Joe Wislocki presented more results from analogue modelling of the formation of the Appalachian Pennsylvania salient at the GSA annual meeting in Seattle. ANALOGUE MODELLING OF THE FORMATION OF THE PENNSYLVANIA SALIENT: DO THE APPALACHIANS BEND AROUND AN ANCIENT RIFT? The Pennsylvania salient is an oroclinal bend in the Central Appalachians at around 40ºN, where Appalachian faults and folds are rotated almost 90º clockwise from roughly north-south orientation observed…Continue Reading “Undergraduate research presented at GSA Annual Meeting in Seattle”

A mountain range like the Appalachians is the result of rock along hundreds of kilometres of plate boundary deforming over millions of years. Curiously, if we want to see these processes in action by scaling them down to the dimensions of a tabletop and the timescales of a couple of hours, then the material of choice is sand. Undergraduate Research Assistant Joe Wislocki has been busy the last few months producing mini-mountain ranges in our sandbox model: Joe’s experiments have been focussed on modeling the…Continue Reading “The Appalachians in a sandbox: undergraduate research being presented at GSA North-Central meeting in Pittsburgh”