This activity focuses on the role of photosynthesis in a sustainable future. Students explore the effect of photosynthesis and respiration in a 'closed systems' containing plankton, marine plants, and fish. By calculating carbon dioxide uptake and production in these systems, they predict a plant: animal ratio sufficient to maintain a system in carbon dioxide 'balance' for one hour.

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Every week, numerous potentially damaging earthquakes occur around the world. To demonstrate the frequency geography of these earthquakes, you will use U.S. GEOLOGICAL SURVEY's Earthquake Tracker, an online resource, to list the locations / facts of all the magnitude 5.0 or higher earthquakes for the 4-day period. You will record information about the earthquakes (e.g., magnitude, date/time, depth, nearest city) in a word processing document and save as a pdf. Once you have completed this assignment, you will save your file and submit it as an attachment.
LEARNING OUTCOMES
1. Successfully interact with the USGS Earthquake Tracker to identify a subset of earthquakes based on magnitude.
2. Understand the relationship between earthquakes and Plate Tectonics.

This activity is part of the community collection of teaching materials on climate and energy topics. This activity was submitted by faculty as part of the CLEAN Energy Workshop, held in April, 2011.

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Students develop an estimate of the total quantity of petroleum
discharged from the Deepwater Horizon from 20 April to 15 July 2010
using only two known facts, the diameter of the riser and the flow rate
of the oil/gas mixture emanating from the riser.

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This activity provides an opportunity for the student to collect data on their individual water use to set the stage for a unit on water resources.

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Spreadsheets Across the Curriculum module/Geology of National Parks course. Students calculate an answer from a bathymetric map by summing volumes of vertical prisms.

This classroom activity presents Calculus II students with some Flash tutorials involving work and pumping liquids and a simple question concerning the amount of work involved in pumping water out of two full containers having the same shape and size but different spatial orientations.

This activity is an observational activity where students observe differnt fossils and predict what they are seeing and how old it might be.

The movement is too white, too privileged, and needs to be inclusive of the voices of black, brown, indigenous, and those who are disproportionately affected by climate impacts.

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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There are 1 billion (1,000,000,000) nanometers in a meter. In this classroom activity students will gain an understanding of what that statement means.

Spreadsheets Across the Curriculum module. Students build a spreadshet to calculate grams solute to add to liters solvent to produce solution of desired concentration (mol/L).

This is an activity where students learn about inquiry by designing an experiment on bean plants with the goal of growing the tallest plant. Students work in groups to plan the growing conditions of the control and three experimental plants. Students collect data for about three weeks and analyze their data to see if their hypothesis is correct or not. The end product can be a report presented in a number of ways.

This activity is a center investigation where students learn about wind force using a fan/wind tunnel and objects.

Students use basic aqueous geochemistry knowledge to investigate controls of the atmospheric carbon dioxide level on pH values of the wet precipitation at standard conditions (25 oC, 1 atmospheric pressure).

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Students explore a variety of objects to discover the many ways the objects move and what force makes them move.

SSAC Physical Volcanology module. Students build a spreadsheet to calculate velocity of rising magma in steady-state Plinian eruptions using conservation of mass and momentum.

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SSAC Physical Volcanology module. Students build a spreadsheet to calculate velocity of rising magma in steady-state Plinian eruptions using conservation of mass and momentum.

Despite what we have learned from the theory of plate tectonics, the specifics of how those plate motions contribute to movement along faults remain a matter of much debate. Since the discovery of plate tectonics, scientists have recognized that earthquake activity, both the orientation and magnitude, is related to plate motions. However, efforts to total up the motion simply associated with earthquakes often falls far short of the plate motions. This suggests that plates have a way to slide past one another along faults without generating earthquakes, and discovering what controls whether faults produce earthquakes is critical for better characterizing seismic hazards around the world. Scientists are using a combination of GPS and seismometer recordings to investigate this issue. Some portions of a fault reveal traditional earthquake stick-slip behavior where gradual GPS motions show the fault is locked for a long time while plate motions cause stress to accumulate at the fault until the rocks break and the fault moves over the span of minutes generating large seismic signals and an abrupt GPS motion. In 2003, researchers discovered that portions of a fault also release accumulated stress more gradually over the course of several weeks in the form of a slow slip event that is accompanied by weak seismic tremors observed in a narrow frequency range that requires specific filtering to observe. These new phenomena are described as episodic tremor and slip as they recur on nearly an annual basis, much more frequently than large earthquakes which can have recurrence intervals of 50-5000 years. To better understand how faults move, this activity will examine both GPS and seismic data in the Cascadia region to identify key observations and build interpretation from them.

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This inquiry lab activity involves students working to understand the characteristics of electrically charged objects using common materials. Students will develop new testable questions.