In the minerals and products activity, students match physical products with actual mineral samples, using observable properties as well as the minerals' chemical formulas and some products' ingredient lists.

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The discussion presented here is meant to augment, not replace, the pre-class reading, as well as to provide an introduction to concept maps.

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This short activity (10--15 minutes) for Unit 1 introduces students to the general relationship between economic development and resource use, and, particularly with the follow-up homework, the relationship among growing populations, increasing economic development, and natural resource extraction. The activity is intended to be completed by individuals or small groups but could also be used for a guided class discussion. This activity serves as a transition to Unit 2.

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This activity focuses on the interrelationships of ore grades, economics, mining impacts/decisions, and other factors. It is intended as a small-group activity, where different groups of students work on one of three different parts, with classroom discussion as a follow-up.

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Even though students will read about sedimentary processes and the mineral resources thus formed, they will need some practice in order to truly grasp the concepts.

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Students will analyze data and answer questions regarding the weathering, erosion, and deposition responsible for concentrating shoreline titanium placer deposits in Florida.

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Students will research two types of salt deposits: solar salt (e.g., facilities in Bahamas) and rock salt (e.g., Heber City, Utah). Students will be able to compare and contrast the two types of salt deposits by creating a concept map.

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Changes in rechargeable battery technology have dictated the supply and demand of commodities such as lithium, cobalt, cadmium, nickel, and lead. Students will study the changing technologies and other societal factors (such as human health) to see their impacts on mineral extraction and processing.

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This activity is based on the global supply and demand relationships of rare earth elements (REE). Students will work in small groups to analyze China's role in global REE production and supply, and how REE production, supply, and demand control REE price.

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Mined phosphorus is considered essential for agriculture, especially with the need to feed the ever growing population. However, there are consequences of phosphate mining and use, including pollution at mine sites and fertilizer processing plants, heavy metal accumulation in soil where fertilizers are used, national security issues intertwined with Morocco's dominance of the world supply, and eutrophication that comes with alteration of the phosphorus cycle. Students will consider these issues, their own roles in the problem, and possible solutions in this jigsaw activity.

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This activity asks students to investigate different aspects of gold mining and think critically about the perceived and real needs for this mineral resource as well as the impacts (both positive and negative) that both gold mining and recycling can have. It integrates concepts and terminology from earlier in the course into real-world situations and personal decision making.
This exercise is set up as a small-group jigsaw activity.

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Question Suppose that you are building a new house. It will take about 90 kg (198 pounds) of copper to do the electrical wiring. In order to get the copper in the first place, someone needs to mine solid rock that contains copper, extract the copper minerals, throw away the waste rock, and smelt the copper minerals to produce copper metal. Rocks mined for copper typically contain only very small percentages of copper -- about 0.7% in the case of most of the big porphyry copper deposits of the world. How much rock would someone have to mine in order to extract enough copper to wire your new house?

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Students evaluate coal leases to determine their potential for coal mining. Each company, student group, has three leases and an exploration budget. Students design and implement an exploratory drilling program on each lease and collect partial borehole cores. Using the resultant data, each company creates geologic cross-sections for each lease as well as structural contour maps. Based on their geologic models, they recommend, in oral and written reports, on which, if any, of these leases the company should pursue and how the extractable coal seams might be recovered.

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Copper is an element that is essential to our technology and to our standard of living. Commonly, the copper is extracted from a variety of copper-bearing minerals that occur in veins. These fossilized fluid pathways record a complex set of geologic processes with non-linear couplings that are the products of hydrothermal activity associated with igneous intrusions (e.g. heat transport, mechanical fracture, mineral precipitation, permeability changes). By carefully examining a rock slab and its mineralogy, one can decipher the series of interrelated processes and their resultant impact on the final product.

Students set about to determine the relative age of veins by visual examination of the rock slab provided. Several generations of veins are recorded by different colors representing different minerals. Using cross-cutting relationships, they list the veins from oldest to youngest. Based on their color, they determine the sequence of minerals that fill veins. This provides an opportunity to review why color can be used to identify some minerals but not others. Once minerals are identified, their ideal chemical formula allows the percent copper in the mineral to be determined as well as the additional elements that must be present to form the mineral. The consequent change in mineral chemistry can be linked to the alterations in fluids flowing through the fractures by analysis of fluid-mineral equilibria on activity-activity (a-a) diagrams. For the more advanced classes, relevant thermodynamic data can be provided and students can write hydrolysis reactions and calculate the (a-a) diagram themselves.

Interpretation of the geologic history begins with the matrix and initial conditions and follows through rock fracture, fluid flow, mineral precipitation, evolving fluid composition, fracture sealing, pore-fluid pressure buildup, fracture, precipitation, etc. in a series of feedbacks. A feedback diagram can be provided and used as a base-map for interpretation not only of the sequence but changes to each reservoir, or students can be asked to draw the series of events and their reservoirs with the mechanisms of change. In the end, students understand the complex series of geologic processes that must come together in space and time to produce an ore-deposit that can be mined for our use. They also wrestle with the complications of reading the rock record and with the ambiguity of interpreting the interaction of various mechanisms that control the final product.

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The online geology lab for community college students was developed during two years of forced online synchronous learning brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic. This open educational resource is a cohesive laboratory manual intended for two-year, non-major college students from the New York area. Each lab is accompanied by a Teacher’s Guide and an online answer sheet (formatted for the Blackboard learning management system). A multiple-choice format is used for many questions, making the labs easy to grade.

I developed this assignment to engage students with geoscience content and explore how minerals impact their everyday lives. Minimal time is needed to implement this assignment.

Assignment Instructions:

For this assignment you will need to take a "selfie" with an everyday product or item that contains a mineral. In our Class Discussion Blog you will POST YOUR PICTURE and write your mineral description. Be sure to also include IDENTIFICATION INFO in your post:

1. Mineral Name and Chemical Composition
2. Physical Properties (Hardness, Luster, Cleavage, etc.)
3. Which rocks and/or type of environment might this mineral be found in?
4. How is the mineral being used in the product?

Once a mineral has been identified by a student in your lab section you can NO longer choose/identify that mineral, SO the earlier you complete this assignment the easier it will be for you. You could take a picture of a rock like granite but you will still need to identify a specific mineral in that rock.

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This activity is a mini-research project in which students independently investigate the variety of natural resources mined from the Earth and the broader implications of this mining. Students then give very short presentations of their findings to the class as a whole.

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This optional homework asks students to investigate some of the impacts of previous mines, mining, and/or mineral resources processing on the surrounding environment and human health. Many of the sites were operated prior to significant changes in the U.S. regulation of mines that was instituted in the late 1960s. Through the investigation of an Abandoned Mine Lands (AML) National Priority List (NPL) website (aka Superfund), students will explore not only the impacts but also the amount of time, effort, and resources it takes to remediate the sites. This background can be referred to in later parts of the module when discussing mining in other countries where the regulations are not as stringent as those in the United States.

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One of the goals of my Mineralogy class is to demonstrate how the principles and content covered in class can be applied to questions of geologic interest or that have practical applications to society or industry. This is an early step towards introducing students to authentic research projects. The general theme of these projects is characterization of Earth materials, and typically involves collection of samples in the field (if possible), hand sample observation, petrographic analysis, and further analysis using X-ray powder diffraction and electron beam techniques such as scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and back-scattered electron (BSE) imaging and elemental analysis using energy dispersive spectroscopy (EDS).

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This group activity charges students with teaching their colleagues about the biogeochemical cycle of one key soil element (e.g., either C, N, S, P, Ca, or Fe). Students are given a single class period to summarize their knowledge and to develop a lesson that includes (1) an organized, 5-8 minute oral presentation, (2) a graphical, conceptual model of their assigned element's soil-biogeochemical cycle, and (3) a list of discussion questions with which to engage their colleagues on the other teams. A second class session is used to refine and to expand upon the submitted models as necessary.

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