This article, written for students in grades 4-5, discusses the world's most southern active volcano, Mt. Erebus of Antarctica. Modified versions are available for students in younger grades.

This article is about the latest remake of Jules Verne's popular 144-year-old novel Journey to the Center of the Earth that also provides links to the American Geologic Institute's (AIG) Educator Guide for using the movie (Journey to the Center of the Earth 3D) to interest students in geology and earth science.

This lab project is in two parts. In the first part students are given a map of Snake River Plain volcanic centers with a range of dates of eruptions. Based on what they know about hot-spot tracks, they use the map and reported isotopic ages to calculate a range of values for the relative velocities of the North American Plate and the Yellowstone hot spot. In the second part, students are given a map of the distribution of a volcanic ash from the Yellowstone volcanic field, with thickness of the ash where known. Students are asked to contour the map to show how the ash is distributed, and think about the factors that affect that thickness, both during and after the eruption. In both parts of the lab students have to deal with real data that is incomplete in some cases, and usually occurs as a range of values. Students must make decisions about how to treat incomplete data sets that do not have absolute values.

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While learning about volcanoes, magma and lava flows, students learn about the properties of liquid movement, coming to understand viscosity and other factors that increase and decrease liquid flow. They also learn about lava composition and its risk to human settlements.

Students will plot the locations of earthquakes on the top of subducting slabs to determine slab dip and will then develop hypotheses regarding the relationship between slab dip, the depth of the slab, and volcanic activity on the surface.

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This lesson presents several images taken from the International Space Station and challenges students to identify the land forms and their locations on Earth.

This presentaton show multiple landforms from the ISS. It supports the Identifying Landforms from the International Space Station Lesson and Learning Lab

Geology is the core discipline of the earth sciences and encompasses many different phenomena, including plate tectonics and mountain building, volcanoes and earthquakes, and the long-term evolution of Earth’s atmosphere, surface and life. Because of the ever-increasing demand for resources, the growing exposure to natural hazards, and the changing climate, geology is of considerable societal relevance. This course introduces students to the basics of geology. Through a combination of lectures, labs, and field observations, we will address topics ranging from mineral and rock identification to the origin of the continents, from geologic mapping to plate tectonics, and from erosion by rivers and glaciers to the history of life.

This text is provided to you as an Open Educational Resource which you access online. It is designed to give you a comprehensive introduction to Geology at no or very nominal cost. It contains both written and graphic text material, intra-text links to other internal material which may aid in understanding topics and concepts, intra-text links to the appendices and glossary for tables and definitions of words, and extra-text links to videos and web material that clarifies and augments topics and concepts. Like any new or scientific subject, Geology has its own vocabulary for geological concepts. For you to converse effectively with this text and colleagues in this earth science course, you will use the language of geology, so comprehending these terms is important. Use the intra-text links to the Glossary and other related material freely to gain familiarity with this language.

Faculty who adopt this text for their course should contact the authors at edits@opengeology.org so that the authors can keep faculty users up to date of critical changes.

In this video segment adapted from NOVA, scientist Mike Garcia draws lava samples at the foot of the active Kilauea volcano to see if it is related to its neighboring volcano, Mauna Loa.

In this lesson, students will learn about how volcanoes are created. Includes video links, discussion, and activity instructions.

NGSS: 2-ESS1-1

Time: 50 minutes

Materials: bucket of clay and toothpicks

In this lesson, students will learn about how volcanoes and mountains affect weather. Includes video links, discussion, demonstration, and an additional activity.

NGSS: K-ESS3-2

Time: 50 minutes

Materials: umbrella and sponge.

Students will analyze USGS seismology data in the classroom using spreadsheets and scatter plots to look for patterns and structure in the Earth's crust. Before analyzing data, students will learn about the methods scientists use to gather seismic data. They will explore plate tectonics, plate boundaries, and volcanoes using Google Earth. The teacher will provide demonstrations on the types of faults and how earthquakes propagate and travel through the earth.

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In this activity, students learn how to contour topographic data from three-dimensional models that they create for themselves. Students examine how topographic contour lines differ based on different topographic features.

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In this classroom activity, students will work in groups to observe how patterns of topography, bathymetry, earthquake locations and depths, and the location of volcanoes vary across regions of the Earth. They will then use this data to predict and map the locations and types of major plate tectonic boundaries. Finally, they should begin to form an intuition about the 3D nature of these plate tectonic boundaries by sketching a cross sectional concept diagram through a convergent boundary, plotting surface topography, earthquakes' locations below the surface, the position of volcanoes at the surface, and inferring the location of the plate tectonic boundary at depth.

Students learn how volume, viscosity and slope are factors that affect the surface area that lava covers. Using clear transparency grids and liquid soap, students conduct experiments, make measurements and collect data. They also brainstorm possible solutions to lava flow problems as if they were geochemical engineers, and come to understand how the properties of lava are applicable to other liquids.

Meet the Earth OLogists is part of OLogy, where kids can collect virtual trading cards and create projects with them. Here, they meet three kids and one scientist who are all fascinated by rocks: Arjun, a nine-year-old from Ohio who has visited his favorite volcano, Mount St. Helens in Washington State. Diana, a seven-year-old from New Hampshire who has hundreds of rocks in her collection. Ruthmabel, an eight-year-old from Washington State who built a Mars rover model at rocket camp and a model volcano at geology camp. Ed Mathez, a curator of Earth and Planetary Sciences at the Museum, who answers kids questions, including "How do kids start a rock collection?" and "What do you want every kid to know about the Earth?"

This article describes the work of Hubert Staudigel and Cathy Constable, researchers from Scripps Institution of Oceanography who study Mt. Erebus, Antarctica's most active volcano.

This activity is designed as a laboratory exercise and to take ~1-1.5 hours to finish.

On May 18, 1980, Mt. St. Helens in the state of Washington exploded in a cloud of ash, plus lava and mud flows. What had been a beautiful symmetrical snow-covered mountain with heavily forested slopes became a startling landscape of ash, mud, and downed trees surrounding a broken, irregular peak. The power of the initial blast was directed upward and laterally, snapping off trees for miles in the blast zone. In the years since 1980, many people â geologists, biologists, environmentalists â have been observing and studying how the landscape recovers after a major volcanic eruption.

In this exercise, students study simplified topographic maps of Mt. St. Helens to interpret the shape of the mountain before and after the 1980 eruption. An option is to have them look at the volcano on Google Earth at this point. Student materials include a graph on which to plot two topographic profiles across Mt. St. Helens to illustrate the change in its shape. The accompanying Instruction file includes calculation of the vertical exaggeration of the profiles, but this section of the exercise may be omitted. Assuming that the material removed by the eruption was in the form of a perfect cone, students use their profiles to measure the height and diameter of the cone to calculate the volume of material removed. Students then compare the result of their calculation with published values for the eruptive material removed from the mountain and identify possible sources of error in their work.

This activity takes place outside of the classroom and requires ~1 hour to complete. Students recreate the map of the Mt. St. Helens ash plume of 1980 and use their maps to answer a series of questions about this ashfall.