For the week of 25 November:
1 – What is a glacier?
2 – Where are the two ice sheets that remain on the planet?
3 – Antartica is made up of an East and West Icesheet – what are the major differences between the two. What is an ice sheet?
4 – How does a glacier flow?
For the week of 18 November:
1 – Trip to Fern Valley in the afternoon.
2 – Meet with Megan from IT regarding the Fern Valley project.
3 – We will discuss the Beaver reading on Weds. – how and why should we be restoring streams?
4 – We will make a timeline for completion of the Fern Valley Project – recall it is your final project.
For the week of 11 November:
1 – We will focus o the Geology of Fern Valley this week.
2 – We will have a quiz Monday.
3 – What is cavitation?
4 – What is Bernoulli’s equations and its relevance wrt to sediment entrainment and transport?
5 – What is stream competence?
For the week of 4 November:
1 – What is an Umlaufberg and how dies it form? We thing there is one just south of Fern Valley.
2 – What is the character of the tributary (drainage network) in and around Fern Valley?
3 – The lake sediments are varves – what are varves?
For the week of 28 October:
1 – What is a Reynolds number?
2 – What is a Froude number?
3 – What do we mean by empirical equations?
4 – We have an exam on Friday.
5 – How does a hydraulic jump form?
6 – What is hydraulic geometry?
For the week of 21 October:
1 – What is stream discharge?
2 – It is abbreviated Q – why Q?
3 – What is baseflow?
4 – What are gaining and losing streams – what are effluent and influent streams?
5 – What is a perennial stream? a intermittant stream?
For the week of 14 October:
1 – Geoclub this week Jay Mosely? Environmental consultant.
For the week of 30 September:
1 – Look at the classification of soils in the reading and handed out in class – what would you expect to see as the type soil at Browns Lake.
2 – What is lame and kettle topography and how does it form?
3 – Read the Ireland reading on deforestation and bogs – how might this affect the soils we see in the bog?
4 – Google Browns Lake bog – what is the history of the site?
For the week of 23 September:
1- Note that there is no class on Monday – Wiles and 25% of the class will be at GSA in Phoenix.
2 – What is a soil and what are the five soil-forming factors.
3 – Next Monday we are headed out to Brown’s Lake Bog to dig some soil pits. What is the age of the parent material of these glacial deposits. The land form is a game – what is a name and how does it form?
4 – What is the time – interns of how long have soil-forming factors been active?
5 – We will be measuring magnetic susceptibility as well as digging soil pits and describing the soil. What is magnetic susceptibility and what can it tell us?
For the week of 16 September:
1 – Note that you have the Spangler report due on Monday -look at the back to the handout for the format of writing up the report.
2 – Note that the Global Climate strike is the same time as the exam on Friday. I will allow you to take the exam before or after the class period if this is an issue.
3 – What is a fining upward sequence?
4 – We are headed back out in the field on Monday – we (you) will be describing a stratigraphic section in sediment in the Little Killbuck drainage of the Park.
For the week of 9 September:
1 – We will be going to Spangler again on Monday. Be sure to bring cameras and your notebooks as the class will be putting up the blog as a way of documenting what we find.
2 – We are putting Soils on hold and moving into mass movements-Read Chapter 4 on mass movements it is classic.
3 – How are mass movements classified?
4 – What is the definition of rheology?
5 – What is a debris flow? We are dating one.
For the week of 2 September:
1 – Outline the geologic (post-glacial) history of Wooster Memorial Park.
2 – What do we know and what don’t we know about the geologic evolution of the Park?
3 – What can the LIDAR potentially tell us that we can investigate?
4 – A big hypothesis is – is the current last few decades of erosion by the stream unusual over the post-glacial.
5 – What is the definition of a soil? In this class we will investigate soils that have been relatively undisturbed – what might be the age of the soils?
For the week of 26 August:
1 – What is the definition of weathering (WX) and how is it different from erosion?
2 – What is LiDAR and why are we focusing on its use?
3 – We will separate our discussion into physical/chemical and biological weathering. This is somewhat artificial as they are all related – explain this idea with examples.
For the week of 21 August:
Welcome – Take a look at the Schumm article linked on the readings page.
1 – What Epoch, Period and Era do we live in?
2 – How do geologists predict? according to Schumm?
3 – We will be looking at a variety of field sites in the region – what timescales and surficial processes do we need to consider?