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”
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?”
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”