Geoscience Education in the Mountain State:
CATS Geology Telecourse, Spring 1999,
Show 4 Transcript

CATS Telecourse Broadcast
Historical Geology
March 3, 1999

Dr. Bob: Greetings everyone! March 3rd and Deb and I are here in snowy Morgantown for our only presentation for the month of March. We have many things to go over today, Deb.

Deb: We have to catch up.

Dr. Bob: We have to catch up. We haven't been on for two weeks. Today we're going to go through a lot of the book work just to make sure everyone knows where they are. Everyone has their books by now. We finally have that all straightened out. We'll also talk about the Precambrian. It may seem rather unusual that out of all the shows that we do, we squeeze about 90 percent of all geologic time into one presentation. But you'll see why, how it relates to West Virginia in a way because it makes for a way of creating the basement.

First Deb, let's get to where we all are and what we need to do and how we're going to make assignments for the rest of the semester.

Deb: The first thing you need to know is by the next time we meet, you should have all three quizzes submitted and a unit plan abstract. I'm going to go over the unit plan in a second. Those of you that have been submitting quizzes over the Internet or via the web site be aware that Tom is acknowledging receipt of those quizzes. If you don't get an acknowledgment, you might want to resubmit or check with Tom.

The unit plan we're going to talk about is a series of lessons that are going to be at least five days long. It will cover some aspect of historical geology in West Virginia. We'll call them plans about "Change Over Time and Distance in West Virginia."

Dr. Bob, when we talk about time, we're talking about stratigraphic columns and the fact that we're looking at fossils in different depositional environments.

Dr. Bob: Geologic time is a concept that gets intertwined with the rock types we see. The number of years cover such long time periods that the rocks formed at any one time become a stratigraphic package. The environment that deposits the sediments that become rock will last for many, many years. Geologically, a beach will last for a long, long time. It has specific kinds of deposits at any one point in time. As that beach remains, the deposits continue to build and may change slightly.

Deb: When we say change over time and distance, what do we mean by distance?

Dr. Bob: If we're looking at a trip from Morgantown to the Outer Banks of North Carolina, you would not expect to be traveling through the same environments. We would be in environments of rivers, mountain valleys, and colluvial material. Continental deposits here in West Virginia. As you move on towards Virginia, the topography drops off when we get to the coastal plain. That environment has been dominated by rivers. Eventually we get to a paludal or a embayment environment. Then finally, barrier islands at the Outer Banks in North Carolina, and then the open sea. But right adjacent to the Outer Banks the water is a bit shallower. Then it gets deeper and deeper out into the Atlantic Ocean.

The point being that as you travel from A to B on the Earth's surface, at any point in time there are different environments. When we look at the rock record, we're trying to determine what has happened over time at any one spot, so we're looking in a vertical sense. If we stood still throughout hundreds of millions of years, what environments were here sequentially as time passed? Additionally, we look to the situation and say, well, at one point in time a great deal of organic material was deposited. For example, the coal that we call the Pittsburgh seam. How widespread was that particular environment at any given time?

When we get out to be with you on Saturday we'll talk more about that and then we will expand on that in the field.

Deb: So our next meeting will be an Exploratory. Let's discuss the unit plan now. The last time we did a unit plan, we assumed that teachers knew what that meant. We knew what we meant but we didn't really relay that to you very well. So, this time we'd like to give you a few guidelines to make sure your on the same page we are. What we're NOT looking for is a series of xeroxed pages of copyrighted materials bound together in a notebook. We need to see a little more of an integrated idea. We need to absolutely see a few things.

One is we need you to identify the grade level. You know what grade you teach but we don't always know what grade you teach. If you could tell that right at the beginning somewhere, we'd appreciate that so we know what you're gearing this towards.

The second criteria is that you need to plan the unit for at least five days. That gives us an idea of what type of sequence of activities you're going to do with your students. It kind of gives us an understanding of you're understanding of the material. So five days is a minimum for us. You can do it for more. You can do it for 15 if you like, but at least five days.

Dr. Bob: How much time on task within each of those five days?

Deb: You mean in terms of activities? State requires that we do 50 percent hands-on, and so that's what we expect to see in your unit plans.

Dr. Bob: How many minutes would be appropriate?

Deb: It depends on the length of the class periods. Some teachers teach for 48 minutes, some for 45, some for 50, some are on block and they have an hour and a half. They have to figure that out.

Dr. Bob: At least 45.

Deb: The next criteria is we need a rich description of your learning cycle stages if you're doing a learning cycle-based activity, and for those of you that have been in the middle schools and the high schools, you know what I'm talking about because you've undergone the CATS training. You understand that the learning cycle has three stages:

It has an exploration where you involve the students in some hands-on activity to get them excited about the material.

From the exploration you move into a concept introduction phase where you describe the material and the content that you're trying to get across to the student.

Then, the third part is the concept application phase in which you then ask the students to apply what they've learned in the concept development stage.

Three parts to that in the learning cycle, for those of you who are in middle school and high school.

Now for those of you in the elementary, you're at a disadvantage here because you've probably never been trained on the learning cycle, so therefore we can't really hold you to that. For the elementary teachers who have not been exposed to the learning cycle, we ask just that you give us a justification for what activities you are doing and when. Just explain to us--you've got this activity here, why are you doing it? How's it going to lead into the next activity or the next discussion you're going to have? So that we can just kind of follow your pattern. Just don't give us a list of activities and say, I'm going to do this geologic time scale activity and then I'm going to go directly into this Pangea puzzle and not explain where the leap came from.

OK. So then the fourth thing is you must describe the activities that you're doing. We understand that you've done these activities sometimes for years and so you say, well, I'm gonna do that activity with convection cells and the Pyrex baking dish. That's OK for you and maybe some of the other elementary teachers or high school teachers that have been doing that activity, but we really need you to spell out what it is you're doing. You can't assume we understand the activity. Put the activity somewhere, the description, the procedures, either in an appendix in the back or just embedded directly into the text.

Then we need you to tell us how you are going to assess. What we're looking for here is, can you employ some alternative assessments? Can you use something other then a pencil and paper and multiple choice test. We're not really looking for you to include a quiz in the back of the unit plan. What we are looking for is how you're going to judge whether the students are understanding the material or picking up on what it is you're doing.

Following the assessment, then, a critical thing that comes down from the state and what we like to encourage--we'd like you to identify the West Virginia Instructional Goals and Objectives that you're going to be using or that the students will be needing by doing these activities.

This unit plan is due on April 21st. We need you to get that in by April 21st because these things are lengthy. There's about 85 of you out there and I have to go through and read every one of those pages. If you get it to me by April 21st, I can get it through by the end of the semester. Now if this is overwhelming to you and you don't think that you can get all of this done, and you can't get the quizzes in, and you can't meet this deadline, please just let us know and we can give you an incomplete. That is not a problem. But you've got to let us know. Don't just not let it show up.

Dr. Bob: I look at all these also, in the sense of the content, the geologic information, and the wrinkles and that sort of thing. So there will be a dual response to you. How many pages do you think these would look like?

Deb: Well, it depends entirely on the richness of their description, and then how much they include. But we've provided a sample for you on the web. One of our students from last semester submitted an exemplary unit plan. So, if we can go to the computer, I can show you how to access it. Click on "Spring 1999" where it says "Sample Unit Plan." You can see it's called "Changes Over Time," so actually some of the material that's in here might spark some interest or might get your digestive juices going on what you can do with your students. But you can see that Angela has planned this for a high school student setting and for 50-minute classes. She has identified a preassessment. If you go to the web site, you can see this italic notation there. Those were actually the notes I put on her original unit plan, so you can see what she wrote, and then you can see the suggestions that Dr. Bob and myself made to her on that unit plan. Then, here at the end in parentheses, she's identified the IGOs. This is really a nice clear format. If you scan down, this is how she is going to preassess what type of knowledge those students had already. Then to explore, she's going to do a little bit of brainstorming or people trying to come up with reasons that the Earth's continents might look like a puzzle. She's got a quick little assessment identified in there. Then, she's got a concept development. She's talking a little bit about science history. Then, she describes again some comments here and some more IGOs. Here is the application that she is going to do. In this particular case, the students are going to get a geologic column and they're going to have to build it using sand art, which was an activity developed by one of our facilitators out there, Deb Rockey . Here you can see Angela has listed the procedures for doing that particular activity. So she describes it above, and then she described how the students do that. You don't have to do it right in the text. You can put it in an appendix if you wish. Then, again, there's a quick assessment. She has actually included the rubric that she's going to assess. You don't have to go into this much detail if you don't want to, but if you are going to use a rubric to assess, I'd really like to take a look at it.

This is an example of a unit plan that was extremely well done. It was learning cycle-based. It was very clear, easy to read, and very well organized. Please visit the web site and take a look at that. Again, I'll be looking at it from kind of a pedagogical point of view. I want to see if what you're doing is age appropriate, and that it flows well, and that the students are getting the appropriate for the IGOs that are used at that grade level.

Then Dr. Bob will be taking a look at the content.

Dr. Bob: As I recall, Angela's paper was for Physical Geology and it wasn't a huge bound volume. It was an elegant package and relatively short. The elegance of it comes from the thinking and the rich prose that you put into it, rather then xeroxing. We are looking for your contributions and ideas.

Deb: The unit plan abstract is to encourage you to think about this unit plan now. So for the next time we meet, you should have quiz one and two already finished. If not, get those in. Quiz three will be posted on the web by Friday. So you should have access to that very soon. We'd like just a one page little description of where you plan to go with this unit plan, what you're thinking about. It's not a contract--if you change your mind that's fine. We just want a kind of an abstract or a quick summary of where you plan to go with it or what you plan to do. That way we can provide you feedback if you're on the right track or if you're way off base.

Dr. Bob: OK. What other sorts of things do we need to talk about, because our next activity are going to be those Exploratories. Of course, here we are and a number of our folks across the state are snowed in, unable to get to the sites, the downlink sites. We received those frantic calls over the past hour and a half tonight. It's that time of the year when the conditions aren't always real conducive to travel. We are pressing on regardless and very shortly we'll have those Exploratories, Deb. Have we settled on where those will be?

Deb: Yes, we finally have. We had to really take a look at where the students were and how easy it would be to get to a site. Unfortunately, when we had to look at the distribution of students, we looked at the students that were taking this for credit that were required to report to a site. So taking that into consideration, the sites that we established are these. Most of you probably got an e-mail already.

One site is in Morgantown, and there we will be at the West Virginia Geological and Economic Survey. So those of you that are in Wheeling, they probably panicked the last time that we said there would be a meeting in St. Marys. You don't have that two-hour drive you thought you had, so you will probably opt to come here rather than go to St. Marys.

The second site is St. Marys. We're working on that right now. Ed, if you're out there, please call Tom. Tom has just confirmed that Ed has agreed to do that at his site.

I believe that has been worked out with you folks in Fayette and Wayne. James has agreed to offer his classroom for that. It looks like I'll be in Morgantown and you will be in Craigsville.

Dr. Bob: I'll be in Craigsville and Tom will be in St. Marys. Now, if you haven't been with us before, the way we work this is that you stay at the same site and we move. So that for the first week, Deb is in Morgantown, I am in Craigsville, and Tom is in St. Marys. The second Exploratory, Tom, Deb, and I rotate one. You come to the same site and you will see one or the other of us. Then through the three opportunities, you'll get to see all three of us. We do different things. We carry our similar package of activities to the three sites so that you will be doing things at different times in the rest of the semester, but you will all be doing similar things.

Deb: Once you choose a site, you really have to stay with that site because of this carousel that we're working. You'll miss something if you don't. The other thing, you need to attend all the Exploratories. We can't express that enough. Those are from 10 o'clock until 3:30 in the afternoon. If you miss one of those, you actually miss eight hours of class. So we really, really must insist that you attend these Exploratories.

Dr. Bob: There will be a make-up session. We are still working on that date to make sure its the best possible date, but it will be in May.

That also brings forth another component that at WVU, where the grades are being generated in the sense of credit applied to you, the grading period is based on WVU's calendar. Here we are in final exams the first week of May. There's a real short time fuse to get the grades in--to get them recorded so they can calculate everything for graduation and such. You can probably be aware of the fact or should be aware of the fact that the grades may not get in for you at precisely the WVU grading period. What that means is you may get a grade form, especially if you're taking other courses that might have an "NR" for no record for this course at the end of the semester. We then do everything by hand. It gets in a little bit later. Unfortunately, the university doesn't directly contact you when we hand-do this work a little bit later, but it will be put on your permanent record and you will be notified of the grades when your next official grade period at WVU occurs. I'd just like to warn you. We will remind you time and again because folks like to get that grade right away. Our schedule of doing things including getting things through the mail and getting things graded and evaluated and so forth don't always meet the very short time scale at West Virginia University.

I guess we got caught up. It has taken us a while to get through the books and all that sort of material, but we're back on a steady schedule now.

If you have looked through the textbook, what I'd like to suggest to you again as we alerted you early on--the textbook is a reference book. Always feel it is there with the appendix for terminology, the index to find words. When you're doing the quizzes, for example, look for the key words that I may have in the quiz and find some pages that may assist you. You don't have to feel obliged to copy things out of the text to answer the quizzes. What I'm after is in your own words and with your own understanding of what type of answer would you give. You'll find that if you compare, and I urge you on these quizzes to talk to each other, but that each person does their own work. You will find that someone else might have a different twist, a different outlook on an answer to a question, but both questions may have received full credit in the answers that are provided by you two folks, but the answers are slightly different. That's OK as along as you use good scientific thinking, good scientific geology background and bases for the fundamental answer that you give. It can be a little bit different and still get full credit. So don't worry about that.

We'll try to get real quick turnaround now. We have quiz one in. As Deb said, quiz three will be on the web site by Friday, so we're moving relatively rapidly in getting those quizzes accomplished.

So the first 200 and some pages set the stage as the author has wished to do it for a variety of background information: the principles of historical geology including such things as evolution and change in life; the classification of life forms; geologic units and environments, and the rocks that result from certain geologic environments. So those first 280-some pages are very general.

One thing that we need to talk about is, let's get Earth started. It is not the intent of this course to be an astronomy, but Deb, let's go over some of the background as to how do we believe today? What is the consensus of scientists with regards to the origin of the Earth?

Deb: Pretty much everybody is buying into what they call the modern nebular hypothesis, that the solar system really kind of was a flat disk with a bulge in the center where the sun eventually began to fuse energy, and that the planets were smaller eddies in the outside of this disk that solidified.

Dr. Bob: So that there is a glob and it starts to flatten out in the disk. But what about the temperature within that? This isn't real hot everywhere, is it?

Deb: No, exactly. The sun is going to be particularly hot because it's the center of this bulge and there's a lot of matter in there. Then for the Earth itself, you've got almost a kind of meteor belt as these things start banging up against each other.

You've got accretion. This means that as the material smacks together, you've got heat that's being generated, and then you just have all of these things starting to pile up like a big snowball. A bunch of rocks and ice and dirt and whatever starts to pile up, and as the collisions increase, the temperature increases and you start to generate heat.

Dr. Bob: As the proximity of particles are together, there's a heat increase, but overall--a term that I had learned when I was studying this was cold accretion, meaning cold, not in the sense of really chilly cold, but certainly not molten material as a fireball, a giant fireball.

Another term that I've found often to be of great value is proto Earth. It's in this time before the real geologic Earth. What I would suggest first of all is that we get some sort of a line. Before that, there are astronomic considerations with respect to now Earth; after this time, geologic considerations with respect to Earth. So that here in the astronomic, we're talking a proto Earth. It was big. It was much bigger than the size now. The density isn't anything like what it is now. But it is a preexisting situation.

The geologic considerations, on the other hand, we would call the "true Earth." Is that fair enough?

Now, how did whole event emerge? I think by and large the term "big bang" is generally understood. What isn't understood is when did the big bang occur?

Deb: That depends on the value of the Hubble Constant, which isn't agreed upon.

Dr. Bob: Just, shortly, what's the Hubble Constant?

Deb: It's the relationship between time and distance. In other words, how far away things are and how long it took them to get there. So there's not an agreement amongst scientists as to what that Hubble Constant actually is. The origin of the universe can be anywhere from eight billion to 15 billion years.

Dr. Bob: At times again when I was coming up, this more firm figure seemed to be comfortable at 12 billion, but if you note eight to 15, 12 is real comfortably right in the middle. That just demonstrates again what we constantly go through in science, that we don't know which theory at any point in time will prevail, much less which theory is correct. I think that's a real elegant little statement because many times there are theories and models, and then we test them and it may prevail for years and years and years until someone, as I always like to say, asks a better a question. When someone asks a better question, the model doesn't fit and then that's what starts a renewal of scientific endeavor--a rush to say, whoa, maybe everything we thought we had taken for granted we shouldn't have. Let's go back and look at it again. It's a renewed flurry of activity and that's when the real advancements come about in science. There will be, in the context, a big bang.

Several billions of years later, the disk eventually formed and the proto planets began to form. Part of the elemental matter that was present in those proto planets is very critical because it's naturally radioactive stuff. What's the great advantage to having just a pinch in this giant cauldron of natural radioactive stuff? Lot's of heat. With the rate of radioactive decay, the heat generated early is critical because it's going to change this astronomic Earth and we have to come to some time in the beginning of geologic Earth. That's where our story begins tonight.

What time are we going to assign to the beginning of that geologic Earth? Now previously on our shows, we've talked about the fact that we use naturally radioactive decaying elements to determine an absolute time clock for rocks on Earth. The radioactive elements that are most useful here are the two isotopes of uranium: U235 and U238, radioactive isotope of rubidium and radioactive isotope of potassium. Those are the critical ones that help us gauge the age of the Earth.

Now however, the next question that could be very appropriate is to say, OK, given all of that, the physicist has given us the tools to determine an absolute age. What is the oldest age we have ever found for rocks on Earth? I'm going to put an age date up here. Now the one that I had known for a long, long period of time was 3.98 "BY," which stands for billions of years before present, "BP." That came from rocks in Greenland. There have been some other dates and some tweaking of this. It is enough for us to talk about it because I believe it's just over four, it's about four billion years. It's a little bit more that are now accepted and that your text shows with a little dot and a location as some of the oldest crystals that are found. However that, you can see, I've floated above our critical line between the astronomic Earth and the geologic Earth. The reason for that is that if you've looked at your text, you know that this time is given as 4.6 BYBP or 4.6 billion years before present, the best reasonable at the present time for the consensus of the age of the geologic Earth.

Where did this extra--this isn't trivial, this is 600 million years--where did it come from? Earlier on Deb, we talked about a researcher from Canada who over the years in the early stages of plate tectonics had just taught in a broad picture. His name was Jay Touzo Wilson at the museum in Toronto. What did we name after his broad work with regards to the plate tectonics system?

Deb: We named the coming together and separating of continents as the Wilson Cycle.

Dr. Bob: So the Wilson Cycle--what sort of time frame, absolute numbers of years, did we place on it?

Deb: Again, it's sort of like the Hubble Constant, but we're talking about 500 million roughly. Is that about right?

Dr. Bob: Yeah, that's about right, about 500 million years. The importance here is two-fold because if you look at the oldest rocks we have found, it turns out that the oldest rocks are dated by minerals that are of a metamorphic origin. So of the oldest minerals we've found in rocks so far, there must have been something before that in order to make it metamorphic. It's because of that "before that." You say, well that sounds a little arbitrary, but in the big picture of metamorphism and the broad sense of things coming together, adding one Wilson Cycle isn't a bad first start. So that's why we use--and that's a simplest model, but it's a good explanation as to why we use 4.6 billion years even though we don't have a rock in the Smithsonian that is rock from day one. It just doesn't exist. Besides, we're at a real handicap because the oldest rocks--what's going to have happened to the oldest rocks on the surface of the Earth? Most of them are covered. Many of them have been reorganized. When we talk, and if you read that chapter again carefully on radiometric dating, you find that we speak in a rather eloquent way--can say that the radiometric time clock has been reset. What that means is that when rocks have got old, then they were metamorphosed and put under heat and pressure, the possibility exists for the elements to start moving about. If elements start moving about, that means radioactive elements can move about, and that means that the radiogenic daughter elements created by radioactive decay can also migrate. If this all migrates, it's like rebuilding a new stone soup, so that the new ingredients, as the temperature drops down, will then create the potential you see for a new radiometric date eventually to be assigned to the rocks. That's what the radiometric time clock can be reset, and if the oldest stuff we have is from metamorphic rocks, that's a real good approximation to add that extra one.

Deb: Most of the textbooks that you get in junior high at least attribute this 4.6 billion years to actually the age of moon rocks.

Dr. Bob: Well now, we do find older rocks, that's true. There did exist at the time of these events of the flattening of the disks and this cold accretion--see, what was happening for all those other planets and including the asteroid belt which probably was a failed planet, there were masses that were built. But if we focus only on Earth, we have a very myopic view. We are the ones that had a great deal of water. We are the ones that had a great deal of geologic processes we know as erosion, transportation, deposition, to cover it. We are the planet in our solar system that has the situation of very active plates moving about. Not all the planets or bodies within our solar system had that "experience."

Deb: If they base this 4.6 billion years on the age of a moon rock, then it must the assumption that the Earth and moon were made at the same time. Is that what they're assuming?

Dr. Bob: A current assumption. The origin of the moon has long been an enigma. As you well know, we have a new kind of theory now based on the evidence we obtained from moon rocks themselves. We have brought moon rocks back to Earth. We finally got a chance to look at them. We left geoseismic instrumentation on the moon to examine the internal structure of the moon, moonquakes--you can't call them earthquakes if they're on the moon. So we actually look at moonquakes to try to get a three-dimensional picture. Therefore the moon is different. So what is the current model?

Deb: The current model is that--there were actually several that were proposed throughout my tenure as a teacher--but the current model is that some big impact hit the Earth while it was still kind of solidifying. It was not quite solid, and then threw a lot of this debris up into orbit around the Earth, and this debris accreted much like the Earth did through these constant collisions.

Dr. Bob: It was a glancing blow, it wasn't a direct hit, although the speculation is that some of that glancing blow material did stick in Earth. Now remember that we're talking somewhere around that 4.6 billion year event. We're talking near the end of the astronomic and near the beginning of the geologic. Some of that large body impact became embedded in the Earth. The Earth in the astronomic time was still pretty much homogenous, but all the ingredients were there. Then the moon would have been kicked out and it would have become a rotational body to Earth without much change, without much loss of it's original or early surface, except for the fact of course that any subsequent volcanic activity, however created, was going to create new coverings onto the old moon.

So we can find old rock that predates 4.6 billion, certainly that predates four billion years. That does exist. We then talk about having the moon starting, we've got the age of the Earth, the geologic age of the Earth, but something has to happen early on because we now know that the model of the Earth is not one of a homogenous distribution of all the elements that are on Earth. Some years ago, proposed was a rather dramatic phrase for it, they called it the "iron catastrophe." The rationale for this was that physicists could make very precise calculations with respect to the Earth. We know what the Earth's density is, overall. Is that a pretty good calculation? Yeah. That's a very reasonable calculation for the Earth's density. We did have meteorites that we could chemically analyze. Right? And there are a variety of meteorite materials: stoney meteorites, iron nickel meteorites where it's an alloy type--it almost looks like a metal, as a matter of fact; they are in numbers far less then the stoney meteorites but they do exist--chondrites with carbon-type content. They're pretty rare too, but there are different compositions in the meteorites. We have, then, the information from the meteorites, we have the density of the Earth, and we can go out and collect rocks from the surface of the Earth and figure out what their density is. It's not at all like the average density of the Earth.

Well, geologists keep collecting rocks and identifying where they may have come from and how dynamic the Earth may have been, and additionally over the past century we have started to try to look internally into the Earth. If Jules Verne would have his way, we could take a journey to the center of the Earth and collect things and pluck them from the walls all the way in. Unfortunately we can't do that. Some would say, let's drill the deepest hole possible and collect things. That doesn't work real well either. There's a finite number of dollars available and our technology doesn't allow us to drill that deeply.

So we have to go to remote sensing. Part of the remote sensing came to be the discovery of the details of energy waves passing through the Earth and the manner in which the waves moved through the Earth. We call them body waves for the important ones for determining a model of the Earth. There are two principle body waves.

The push-pull waves, also called primary waves, the type of waves where if I push, I bounce back in a sense against the material that I'm pushing. I can do that in the air and send a current your way, or if there was a solid piece of wood between you and I, I would just tap the end on my end and you could sense with the appropriate instrumentation a vibration on the other. Or if there was a body of water between us, I would drop a rock in it at my location and a wave would slowly move out to you as the push-pull, the interaction between where I generate the force here out to you. There is an action-reaction as that energy is distributed. It moves very rapidly, relatively so. It moves more rapidly in solids then it does in gas. It moves on out in that direction in the propagation direction.

The second body wave is a sheer wave. The analogy is always to take a rope, attach it to the doorknob, and snap it. The snapping motion means that I am going to make the motion vertically at my site and it's going to transmit that energy by a series of sheering. Each particle on that rope is going to pull against it's neighbor. It's going to make a wave travel that rope. That is a sheer wave. Since I generated it up and down, but I want to send it that way, the velocity is going to be a little bit slower then the push-pull wave. The energy nonetheless will reach you the viewer.

Now the "S" wave also could be called a secondary wave because it takes longer to get there. The "P" wave could be called a primary wave because it got there first. With those two body waves, we also say, now wait a minute, what about the sheer wave? The primary wave or P wave travels through solids, liquids, and gases, but the secondary wave, sheer wave, we've just said it does it in a solid. Does it do it in water? You say, well, you can make this vertical motion in the water but the energy is attenuated so close to where you made the motion that effectively the sheer wave doesn't move through the water. The energy is absorbed in the sheering system, turned into heat, and it dissipates, it dies. The same thing in gas because in the air, if I lower my hand rapidly, those in the studio audience, I say, did you feel the wind? You say, no. Because the particles moved against, they sheered against each other right against my hand. A little heat was generated but that was it. It didn't really generate it, the sheering wave throughout the medium. So the S waves travel only in solids; the P waves travel in solids, liquids, and gases. The result was a model of the Earth. The model of the Earth had an inner core and then an outer core. That outer core was not allowing the transmission of sheer waves. Therefore, what did that outer core have to be? To the seismic waves, it had to be like a liquid. So think of it as a seismic liquid in the outer core. Then there's a great volume around at the mantle. P waves and S waves move through it just fine. Then a thin outer portion, the crust.

Deb, there was one model of a fruit where students have often been asked to slice it open and look at it in the model of the Earth.

Deb: Actually, there have been several. I never liked the apple model cause it has a bunch of seeds in there. But I always thought a peach fit better than that.

Dr. Bob: Yeah, a peach pit would work out a little sloppy to work with. A peach would work real nicely. The very thin skin is what we live on, and so often with our students having them realize the scale to which we are describing things. If we all suited up and hiked from sea level just to the top of Mt. Rainier, we'd be huffing and puffing, much less to go from the deepest part of the ocean to the peak of Mt. Everest. Yet, when we place it in context of the scale of the model of the Earth, the crust of the Earth is just a wee thin little rind. It is but a small portion. That's another interesting exercise. We can take butcher paper and lay it out in the hallway with a scale and actually see how much is really the crust of the Earth. The crust of the Earth is the thickest in the continents. It's thin in the oceans.

So we have, then, this model of the Earth from the geophysical data, the material we collect from outer space, the density of the Earth, we've got these differences. We know, then, that a good model would have very heavy stuff in the center. The very heavy stuff could be like these nickel and iron meteorites. So we say that, well, nickel and iron if the Earth became molten with all this radioactivity, then the heavy materials, denser material sank towards the center. The iron catastrophe. Now just prior to that, we're going to take a break in a second, but there's an extra thought. When that cold accretion of the astronomic Earth occurred, were there any gases there?

Deb: If there were, they'd be diffused.

Dr. Bob: They'd be diffused. The solar winds would have blown them away. So what we're left with is the dilemma. There's an Earth, but where does the atmosphere come from? We'll take a break now. Hold that breath until we get back and we'll talk about the origin of the atmosphere and get to the details, the Precambrian.

(BREAK)

Dr. Bob: I hope you held your breath all that time! The fact is that whatever original gases were cumulating along this disk moved out because solar winds have the potential to move very low density particles out. Of course, the inner planets are the terrestrial-like planets, the Earth-like planets. The Jovian planets are the large gaseous planets, except for good old Pluto, which is kind of like a rock out there. The Jovian planets with the gas accumulated farther out. Earth was left without an atmosphere but it was hot. This collapse, if you will, of dense material into the center is going to promote movement in this early geologic phase of the planet Earth. As a result, gases come out.

Deb: The gravitational pull is strong enough such that it can maintain an atmosphere.

Dr. Bob: By that time, the iron is in the center. We're getting compact, about the size of the Earth today.

Deb, do students ever ask if the Earth is expanding? Is the Earth shrinking? What is happening to the Earth?

Deb: They asked that when you get to plate tectonics. That's when they ask that.

Dr. Bob: Ah, OK. That's a good point to ask because if there's new stuff coming up, where is it stored? Where is there a closet to store all the extra? Of course, what happens is that it's going back down under in subduction zones in other areas.

Now, one thing that is unusual about the Earth and always has been felt unusual is that the Earth rotates more rapidly then it should. In part, that's another one of the proofs of having this glancing blow to create our moon early on. It gave the Earth a little extra kick or spin and it allowed Earth to rotate more rapidly. Of course, what has happened to the rotation, it wobbles and it's also slowing down. When we talk about some of the invertebrate life forms on the next show we have next month on April 7th, there, we'll talk about the concerns of growth rings on things like corals, and the fact that an Earth year at that time had many more days, maybe up to 600 days in a year, so that the Earth is slowing down.

But be that as it may, we're trying to get now to the atmosphere and the gases are coming out. I sometimes call it an out-gassing of the interior, and degassing is another word that is used quite often in the text. But what was the nature of that early atmosphere?

Deb: It was a foul atmosphere at best.

Dr. Bob: It was not nice! It's not something that you and I equipped as we are would live in because what was lacking? Oxygen, probably less than one percent of what we currently have in oxygen content in that first atmosphere. Right now we're about 19 percent oxygen, something like that. It's a very incendiary atmosphere if you think about it, especially for plants. We couldn't stand a whole heck of a lot more oxygen and still enjoy the forests and the plant life that we do. But that's another story yet to come.

So this degassing of the interior creates an atmosphere that we called a reducing atmosphere.

Deb: Lots of methane and sulfur dioxide.

Dr. Bob: Lots of nasty stuff. But then the point and the question is how is it going to become an atmosphere that we now know and love and when did that happen? How did it happen? I'll do a quick outline of where we're going to be for the last part of tonight's show.

First of all, chapter 11 and chapter 12. That is the reading material that you want to be looking at. A very special note are two marvelous visual cartoons. One of them, pages 286 and 287; the other one is on pages 316 and 317. Those cartoons, if you can feel comfortable explaining these cartoons in general to a class, you've got it. They aren't real busy cartoons. With this in mind, this is what our outline is going to look like.

First, we're going to talk about the atmosphere. Then we're going to talk about a big chunk of geologic time, the Archean--really old, much of it lost in the antiquity of time. We're going to do such things as the origin of life, the origin of plate tectonics, the oldest fossils, and we'll be real interested in building continents. Then the next younger period is the Proterozoic. Again we'll talk about life. We'll put the initials down, the "B-I-F," which is really important, and glaciations. And we'll link all this to West Virginia and especially the BIF.

Let's go to the top of our outline, the Archean life. What do we think we know, Deb, about life in the Archean? How did it begin?

Deb: We think that the Archean life started in very extreme conditions like volcanic vents. So a place where a volcanic vent, at this point, might be found in, say, a spreading center much like the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. Extreme conditions, no oxygen, very dark but there are lots of sulfurs and sulfur dioxides. These would be for you biologists out there a type of chemotrove or an organism that lives off of chemicals as opposed to sunlight. So that's where they think these extromophiles began.

Dr. Bob: What would happen if there was oxygen there?

Deb: Then a different form of life would have evolved.

Dr. Bob: Or they would have been subject to decay, lots of problems. There had been, when I was beginning in my studies of the Earth and you also Deb had heard of this, in the early 1950s, a laboratory experiment. A PhD student working with a professor in the laboratory created an experiment. Did they create life?

Deb: No, certainly not, but it did get people thinking about this whole concept of life beginning in the oceans in an organic soup of sorts. What they simply did was they put methane, hydrogens, carbons, and oxygens into a Florence flask of sorts, heated it, and then introduced an electric charge, much like what you would expect with lightening in a primitive environment.

Dr. Bob: When I studied that and reviewed that, where did they think life might have or this type of an environment would have existed? They weren't thinking deep down because they didn't have plate tectonics as a model in 1953. What were they thinking of?

Deb: They were thinking of the shallow parts of the oceans.

Dr. Bob: Yeah. They used the term the primordial soup that here was an ocean with some dissolved material. You've got some elements available, you have these other gases, lightening flashes, and what happened in that flask was that it got cloudy. But what was the cloudiness?

Deb: The clouds were amino acids which, of course, we know as the building blocks of proteins which we know, of course, are the building blocks of life. So everybody got really excited in 1953 because this was support of this organic soup model with the lightening which would be something that you would find in our atmosphere. These chemicals would not be things that you would not find also dissolved in water. So they got excited about it and said, OK, well, from the amino acids then we get life.

Dr. Bob: But it still remains as a very important experiment.

Deb: That's right. It showed that you could generate the building blocks of living organisms from those individual compounds by introducing lightening or an electric charge.

Dr. Bob: A Russian was doing some of the things contemporaneously, wasn't he?

Deb: Yeah. This was done in 1953 by a group of fellows, one Stanley Miller, and the other one I don't remember his first name but it was Urey. But a fellow named Operon was doing much of the same work. It was a little bit earlier actually then they did. I think he was generating organic compounds, not long chains or amino acids.

Dr. Bob: The other interesting thing is that when we did come to a new view of where life began, it was connected to the deep sea vents. They go by such names as growlers or smokey vents, white vents, or gray dark vents. But we started looking with submarines and little submersibles, unmanned submersibles, into these very active parts of the Earth's crust that are now ongoing. There's one off the coast of Washington state that they go out to quite often and they continue to monitor this. This is relatively recent isn't it?

Deb: That's right. Well, the technology has improved such that we can get down that deep and we can film it rather then just taking chemical samples or snapshots or stills, and so we can do a lot. Also, they're getting down into sending little robots down into geysers, down deep into these vents and collecting data.

Dr. Bob: Early on we were surprised by the mega life--strange tube worms that were huge; large fist-sized clams deep within in these chemical environments out of sunlight, really strange environments. And then we found that there's a wealth of microscopic activity, these extremophiles. This has been an evolution of consideration of life forms. Now the other interesting thing is where did the water come from to fill the ocean basins?

Deb: Well, most of it they believe for a long time, many, many years, it was believed that this was a degassing event. These water vapors with these primitive volcanoes would have entered the atmosphere and then, of course, would have saturated, and then it would rain.

Dr. Bob: The water, then, was thought of as being generated from terrestrial stuff. But a very interesting little article almost tucked away in a science magazine for school kids...

Deb: About the mid-eighties, about '87 or so, I was teaching at what was then eighth grade earth science and came across in those weekly readers that you send home--they sent me one copy as a trial, and whatever I read in there I usually relayed to the students. As a matter of fact, that's where I heard about the 300-foot telescope collapsing way back then, was in the same newspaper, but they mentioned that this fellow had come up with this theory that some of the Earth's water vapor and ocean waters could have come from these teeny little comets that bombard the atmosphere. So I took that as gospel and thought this to be a well-accepted fact for years and years and years, and just recently heard...

Dr. Bob: As I recalled, it was an astronomer from Iowa or Iowa State and he had no way of proving it. Therefore, it was an interesting theory, but then he designed an experiment on one of the recent space ventures, just recently over the past two years, and they actually set up cameras and they captured on film this constant bombardment--pictures of these little micro comets, these little ice flakes impacting the Earth. By looking at those and say, whoa, this is just a snapshot in time. Think of 4.6 billion years, all the water on the Earth could, in theory, be generated by the collection of that material. So the origin of the Earth's water is now another interesting debate, as well as the origin of life on Earth, because there was found in Australia a meteorite a number of years ago that had organic-type building block materials, these amino acid-like compounds in it. There are those who would say that Earth was populated from "outer space" or it was a nest ready to fulfill whatever it came on and be a growing medium. It's like creating this huge medium and then just have something come into it and voilà.

Deb: It's amazing just how much in the way of organic chemicals we find in space. They use these radiotelescopes to use spectroscopy to see what types of chemicals are out there. There are enormous amounts of organic compounds that are found in space that we just never even dreamed of.

Dr. Bob: So there's lots of questions. You know if your students say, gee, why should I be a scientist? Everything's been discovered. Remind them that back in the 1890s, the then director of the Patent Office, the United States Patent Office, suggested that the Patent Office be dissolved as a branch of the U.S. Government because he was personally convinced that everything that could be invented had been invented, and at that time in 1890, they really should shut it down as a economy for the federal government. I think there were 90,000 patents last year, as we continue on.

Life on Earth began, but what was it like? What evidence do we have as to why should there have been the potential for that life on Earth? Part of it, if indeed, it's these growing vents. A good question is if the Earth at that early stage, 4.6 billion years ago, in the beginning of the geologic Earth, was it a modest number of these vents? Or was the Earth so hot, in comparison to what it is now, that these vents could have been very, very numerous. And intuitively it suggests that they were everywhere because the potential was there for those vents to be everywhere. What about today's model of plate tectonics? Do we have vents everywhere in today's model? The answer's no. We have a limited number of those things. So the suspicion is, and all other evidence helps to point to this, that there were no big continents early in this Archean period. There were lots of little things at best, because it was so active. There was so many spreading centers that things had to calm down for one to two billion years before a more modern picture of the Earth's surface could evolve.

The next thing I want to talk about, then, was plate tectonics. When did plate tectonics begin? Not for a while. We don't have good evidence of plate tectonics at this very beginning of the geologic Earth. What about the oldest fossils? How old are some of the fossils? Well, if you look at the pictures, you find that the oldest fossils--this is the cartoon on page 286--the oldest fossils go back about 3.4 billion years or so, but they're not real elegant, are they? No, not much to speak of. They're filaments and they're bacteria, blue-green algae, but are they life forms? Absolutely.

Deb: They certainly are. They photosynthesize, too.

Dr. Bob: Yeah, they photosynthesize. What are cyanal bacteria? What does that suggest?

Deb: That they're blue-green algae.

Dr. Bob: Blue-green. What type of atmosphere--they were photosynthesizing, but what would happen to some of the oxygen that they could form?

Deb: Most of the oxygen that they formed was then sucked up by things in the atmosphere, where things on Earth that were like iron would rust.

Dr. Bob: Iron, sulfur, the two big--what we call--we use a more elegant term then "suck up stuff," They're the sinks--that's it, yes, exactly--the sink for oxygen, the two sinks for oxygen. Iron compounds and sulfur compounds. It's very interesting, too, as you read in this chapter, all these little lightbulbs hopefully will go on because we don't find in the older rocks evidence of sedimentary units like limestone. Not for a long, long time do we find the potential to create carbonates. Not for a long, long time on the early phases of the geologic Earth do we find evaporites. Do we find a lot of silica material like sandstones and that? Absolutely, 100 percent. You find it all the time, and moreover, a lot of it was from volcanogenic, volcano origin. The volcanos formed and eroded and the materials cascaded on down the flanks. Then on a slope, they collapsed and even things that were above water level--there were not plants, there were no roots, there were no soils in that context that we think of today. We have to picture in our minds a whole new world. It was a rough world, I'll tell you. The chemical reactions, there was not enough free oxygen to do things but lots of acid rain. The first droplets of water that fell on Earth must of had a real dissolved load of gas in it so that the pH was low. If the kids ask when did the first acid rain fall on Earth, you'd say probably the first drop of water that fell on Earth from a cloud was an acid raindrop. It must of been nasty by today's standards, but it was critical.

We find, then, those earliest fossils way back 3.4 billion years, and by about three billion years, we have some new friends, these cyanal bacteria, these blue-green algae. What do they build?

Deb:. They build these mats.

Dr. Bob: What do we call them?

Deb: Stromatolites.

Dr. Bob: "Stro" means root. I always think, remember that stromatolites--we're going to run into another word when we talk in the Paleozoic of a different animal form that's going to sound a lot like stromatolites. Think of the stromatolites, the mat and the mats mounded up. These are pretty simple things. You say, are these all mats? But they're all little filaments. They're combinations of these filaments and they are sticky. Because they are sticky, water currents moving particles, the particles are going to stick to the little filamentous blue-green algae. The blue-green algae are going to say phoo, and another one grows on top. You get this mat building up of blue-green algae fibers and the grains. Of course, which way is up? When you look at this you say, oh, OK. Maybe when you see these mats, they're going to look like this. Now it's interesting, do we still have stromatolites with us today?

Deb: Sure.

Dr. Bob: Yeah, in very normal sea water or unusual, real saline. There's an interesting story. Want a connection? If these stromatolites are real abundant, what do they really represent once invertebrate life forms come along? It's a four letter word. These are producers, they're food. What are those early invertebrates going to do? Grow fat and happy and numerous. What's going to happen to the stromatolites? They're at great risk of becoming extinct unless adaptation. Now, in what type of an environment might these type of forms or variations of these stromatolites survive where they're not going to be chowed down on but in the real saline environments. Critters never really did get the hang of living in high-level saline environments and as a result, some of the stromatolites made it through the next 600 million years by finding an environment where they wouldn't be eaten.

Now, if this personifies them as if they packed up and shipped off to this salty environment, it's an interesting picture. Kids will understand that in a way, and hopefully they'll say that's what happens, that there is pressure and some things succumb to the pressure. Others struggle find new niches and survive.

So, stromatolites are increasingly important because they achieve photosynthesis, and every once in a while, there's a little bubble of oxygen. As a matter of fact, you can see in these stromatolites little bubbles under water. They're neat things. Sticky as all ugly to fiddle around with, but of course, if you let them out to die, they would get pretty ripe, but this is a real interesting mass. Eventually, what is it going to create? Enough oxygen to slowly create the changes, but are these deep water forms? No. They're shallow water forms.

Moments ago, we said that the continents remain small. If continents remain small, what's the problem of many little continents? What is the likelihood of there being a well-integrated evolutionary pattern in the shallow water environments around continents? There isn't much. What we need are for continents to start coalescing. We need to look for evidence when the first larger continents began to form. We find that finally in the Archean, and the oldest example happens to be in what we used to call the Northwest Territories. It has now been, through the Canadian government, turned over to the Inuits and it's a new territory. They no longer use the term Northwest Territory, but it's a group of formations that you're going to find. It has a Native American sound to it: Wopmay. That turns out to be the evidence of the first really larger continental margin and a more typical modern--it could be thought of as the first modern continental margin type of history in geology. A very important consideration.

Another thing that you'll look for geologically a bit earlier, so I'll put it down below--greenstone belts. These greenstone belts seem to just precede the Wopmay, and greenstone--if the rock gets wet, what color is it? It's green. It started out as volcanic material and volcanic-eroded material like sediments. I call it volcanogenic. Started out as a volcanic extrusive igneous rock but then erosion mixed it all up and it came down along the flanks of the volcano. But then it got changed and altered by pressure. It looked like these continents are starting to come together to form the larger continents at the end of the Archean. That is the first evidence of that Wopmay Group.

The critical component of this, then, is that we talk about this larger continent environment as being a craton. A craton is a lot like a shield, a large shield-type area. The shield terminology has long been in geology. These cratonic shields, the heart of all continents, these just started to get bigger and bigger so that by about 2.5 to three billion years ago, we have this start of modern geology. Again, let's say 3.5 billion years as a figure to work with. If we talk of a Wilson Cycle as about 500 million to 600 million years, how many cycles could have occurred since the big cratons were formed. It could be six or seven, and I would suggest to you that your textbooks don't generally speak to that. Your textbooks quite often imply that the latest plate tectonic event was "the one." We have evidence that these continents were moving apart, reforming numerous times, perhaps six or seven major cycles. As we look at the entire time, the Archean is the oldest time frame, from 4.6 billion years before present to 2.5 billion years. We go to the 4.6 to 2.5. This is the time frame that we call the Archean.

Then we go onto the next chapter, the Proterozoic, to take it from 2.5 billion years to 0.6 billion years, and this is the Proterozoic. The events of the Proterozoic are demonstrated on that two-page foldout on pages 316 and 317. As we get to this younger time period, we find that there are more time units, and we obtain these units always by radiometric dating of events. More and more a history of resetting the geologic time clock. As far as life goes, Deb, was there much real change yet?

Deb: Not yet.

Dr. Bob: Not yet. Billions of years, these filamentous bacteria are going about their business, blue-green algae creating a little bit of oxygen here and there, but it has tipped the scales so that by the time we get to about the middle of the Proterozoic, we're going to have enough extra oxygen so that the Earth's atmosphere eventually is going to be a modern atmosphere. We're going to create that potential.

There's something that occurs at this time that is really interesting. It's called the "B-I-F." The B-I-F stands for banded iron formation. In the early 1800s in the regions of Lake Superior and Lake Huron, the Canadian Government and the U.S. Government were well aware, because the Native Americans had used it for generations prior to the arrival of Europeans on the continent, that there were metals in those rocks. One of the metals was copper, easily used in amulets. Pounded, it was soft. Another one that the Native Americans didn't use but knew of was this real heavy rock, and it was in many places in the Lake Superior area. Deb, hasn't held this yet. Is this a dense rock?

Deb: This is a dense rock.

Dr. Bob: It is a dense rock. I'll put it--I don't just how well it's going to show up under the overhead but this, can you see bands in it? Can you see some bands in it? See there? This material is hematite and magnetite. It's iron oxides and there's chert in here, silica content, and it's of sedimentary origin. It's banded. The iron was combining with oxygen on a sea floor probably close by vents where all this iron was coming out in this vent activity and this type of material was banded because the variation--here for example is a band, here's another band--it glistens. Can you see these bends? This had been bent or deformed. Here it's weathered a little bit. Can you see all those little thin marks? Those are all the different bands. These formed over two billion years ago or 1.7 billion years ago about, a long time ago. This is part of the banded iron formation. It was found in the Lake Superior area and because it was found in the Lake Superior area, and it was mined in 1848 and then the rest of the century it became studied in that area, and it became known as the Lake Superior type.

What is the connection to West Virginia? Well, this was the source, here's Michigan, Minnesota, and this iron was brought by train and eventually by large boat because it was cheaper to ship by boat to places where they could bring energy resources. So the iron, the crude iron, as the element, is coming from one direction. The coal is coming from another direction and then you say, where could that coal come from? One place: West Virginia. So the iron is coming from Minnesota and Michigan, the coal coming from West Virginia, and what we're going to make is iron and then steel. But there is a lot of material that's not to be used out of this banded iron formation, so we have to add something else. That something else is a flux stone. That flux stone can also come from West Virginia. The quarries over in Martinsburg, those carbonate rocks that comes over too, and where does it meet? It meets in Gary, Indiana. It meets in Wheeling, or it meets in Pittsburgh as the steel industry begins, and West Virginia plays that role, and a great part of that comes from the iron ore deposits of Precambrian age in the Lake Superior type.

The final aspect that you'll read about is this word: Grenville. It is a collision of massive continents, a coming together that ended from 1.1 billion year ago to about 1.0 billion years ago. Continents came together. The pattern was like old Pangea but it was predating. Why is that Grenville important? It reset the radiometric clocks. If you go to the basement in West Virginia--remember that term--the basement rocks are the oldest rocks in West Virginia, and everywhere in West Virginia, guess what the age is? Grenville. If you drill down in St. Marys, you'd go down over 15, probably 12 to 15,000 feet or so. We don't have many holes in West Virginia all the way to the basement. In places we have them and it's over five miles of sedimentary rock to get down to the basement. If we went all the way to Harpers Ferry, there we could see rock ahead of us that's just at the very latest Precambrian time. The youngest of the Precambrian are the oldest rocks that we have at the surface. The really old basement rocks all have this signature date of the Grenville, so that along the eastern United States, there's a whole basement complex up and through Canada and up towards parts of Greenland. The basement of West Virginia formed at the end of the Proterozoic.

Deb: Actually, there wasn't even a land mass then until the Grenville came in.

Dr. Bob: Well, there were. The continents were getting bigger and bigger and there must have been larger continents, but this was a big supercontinent, the first real history we have of one. So the connecting link to West Virginia is made. We now have a foundation or basement to build upon in the State of West Virginia. The rocks are 1.1 to 1.0 billion years old, based on radiometric dating, but the next layers of rock that we're going to find are going to be much younger. They're going to be 600 million years, 500 and some million years, so there must have been a great time period of erosion. So West Virginia must have been mountains at the end of the Grenville, and eroded down for a long, long time.

So read in chapter 13 as we begin next time on the development of West Virginia in the Paleozoic. Until that time, remember the Exploratories. There will be a web site telling you of maps on how to get there. So we'll see you on March 20th at Exploratory sites. Check the web site on maps on how to get there. Go home easy tonight; come home good. Take care!

WVGES Education Specialist, Tom Repine (repine@wvgs.wvnet.edu)

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