Geoscience Education in the Mountain State: CATS Applied Geology Telecourse, Spring 2000, Show 3 Transcript

CATS Telecourse
Applied Geology
February 22, 2000

Dr. Bob: Greetings everyone! What a wonderful day for a field trip. It's a great day for a field trip today. Even after we had those heavy rains now we have that feeling that the back winter's broken and we're headed into spring. With Deb Hemler, this is Bob Behling. We're here for yet another of the CATS Earth Science Telecourses. Deb, why don't you start off with a few comments and things that you need to do to get everybody geared up.

Dr. Deb: We'll do some house cleaning here. First order of business is from Tom. The quiz due date is March 1st. Those of you that are doing these over the Internet, get those in by March 1st. If you're mailing them, make sure they are postmarked by March 1st. We probably won't have the quiz up this week. The Webmaster is out of the office for the week so expect that early next week to appear on web. You have a little bit of a reprieve there. Work on finishing up quiz # 1 this week.

An announcement that we should probably make. We mentioned this briefly before and this is the electronic field trip that is taking place, this is tomorrow. Tomorrow is the Glacial National Park electronic field trip. The web site www.sd5.k12.mt.us\glaciereft\ will get you there. If you are interested in this you will need a web browser. The other thing you really need for this is a Real Player G2 if you don't have that you go to this site and download it for free. It allows you to see the videos that they are going to be broadcasting. Make sure you take a look at that. The broadcast, Fire in Nature is at 11. The one we would probably interested in would be the 12 p.m., Shrinking Glaciers. They're also going to rebroadcast the one from last year on the Yellowstone National Park, Past, Present, Future. That's going to be on Thursday the 24th. You notice we've got Eastern Standard Time. Those original times that are posted there are Rocky Mountain Times. Check those out, if you've never done an electronic field trip they're pretty interesting. It's probably a good idea to project this instead of having every student sit at their own terminal. If you don't catch it, these are archived on the site so you can access those later. They do have a teacher's guide. If you register tonight or tomorrow morning they'll get you the teacher's guide later on.

Dr. Bob: Will everything be on later or are there certain things, the reels aren't on and how long will this be up?

Dr. Deb: I don't know. I know that it's being broadcast live tomorrow and the significance of that is that you have one of three options for communicating with the people that are broadcasting this. You can get into a chat room, use e-mail, or you can use the 1-800 number that's on the web site that's available to you. If you want to do this with your students they can interact. The people presenting this on the web site will say, "We have a question from Kingwood Elementary School," the kids get all excited because they are mentioned on TV. They won't mention names but you get to interact and ask questions. If not, you can always come back and view the reels and whatever is archived there, you just won't be able to communicate with them.

Dr. Bob: Very good. There's an interesting article, since you mentioned the Yellowstone site, in the paper yesterday that the pine nuts are at risk. In Yellowstone National Park moister conditions are now rising in areas that were drier and the pine nuts were preserved, therefore, the squirrels and the birds could capture the nuts and store them and the grizzlies would come along in the winter, find those caches of nuts and eat them. But because of the moister conditions, now there are bacteria, fungus, and the trees are going to be at risk. If the trees go the whole structure of the web of life there may start to crumble and the old grizzlies, being right at the top, is at risk. They'll go after garbage cans and that sort of thing. That's not going to serve that grizzly bear well.

Dr. Deb: It's a natural way of life for predation and disease to take over in these places so then you have a nice study of succession.

Dr. Bob: That's right. The climate change may be doing it.

Dr. Deb: There's one last thing. I really wanted to focus on one thing that was mentioned in our last show that may have been confusing and might be a source of misconception's among your students. I mentioned the fact that a shield volcano has a very low angle of repose. That means it's very shallow on either side and then within 10 minutes of that Bob mentioned that Kiluaea and those areas, the old volcanoes on the Hawaiian Islands have snow on them. We want to make sure that you understand that just because it has a low angle of repose does not mean it is not high in elevation. (Shows a diagram on overhead comparing a shield volcano and a strato volcano.) If you look at the white thing in the center, that's Mt. Rainier, which we've been talking about, of course, as being in the Cascade range. If you look at the big black shallow, kind of blob, surrounding Mt. Rainier, this would be Maunaloa and Kiluaea there on the right combined so you can see this is a big huge shield volcano. This is where we get this idea that it's very shallow, it's very large, and has a low angle of repose, whereas Mt. Rainier is steep sided, being a stratovolcano. That's what we mean by that. It's not to say that just because you have a low angle of repose doesn't mean you don't get high in elevation. You can see that line on either side of the diagram marks sea level which is 19,000 feet, or something like that. So you can see that just to get to that line it has to have reached at least 19,000 feet. You can see it extends well beyond that.

Dr. Bob: So that an enormous ratio of magma has come out at Maunaloa as compared and contrasted to Mt. Rainier. They're both put on a common base meaning Mt. Rainier started on the continental shield but Maunaloa started on the ocean floor. The relative volumes are quite disparate. It's a significant difference as to what Maunaloa and the Hawaiian shield volcanoes are.

Dr. Deb: The angle of repose then, of course, reflects the magma and the tefra that's being ejected from the composite cone. It's piling up whereas Maunaloa is flowing freely and expanding and stretching out.

Dr. Bob: Then, even at those low angles, there are subaqueous or below the sea level landslides of tremendous volumes of material that just keep magnifying the shallowness of the slope. They keep finding a level below water that keeps building out and out and out. So it's a very low angle to that slope.

Dr. Deb: I just wanted to make sure that we got that straightened out and that we didn't confuse last episode. I thought about that after we left. With that finished I think we can move on with the next topic.

Dr. Bob: We don't always try to confuse you but then we do confuse you from time to time. Let us know about that, give us a call or come up on the web site the following day and we'll get back to you immediately with an answer and/or we'll repeat it the next time that we get together with these shows.

Let's look at the outline of today's activities. We've named this, Tools of the Trade. There are certain things that we use and you can use in the classroom without an enormous amount of expense that will greatly help working with earth science. We'll talk about maps, both topographic and geologic. We are borrowing upon a great movies that's shown all the time at the Smithsonian, The Powers of Ten. In other words, we'll talk about the value of magnifying some things and having kids look at things under greater power. We'll have some comments about collecting, some do's and don'ts. We'll also relate to the recent floods this past weekend as a potential research project in and around your own area. We'll also tell you the things that you need to stay away from and watch out for and we'll relate to that under collecting also. Then following the break, we'll get back to particle size analysis. We'll take some sediments, perhaps a river sediment, and we'll distribute it into it's relative particle sizes and talk about the energy required to move it. Some brief comments about planning a field trip, gathering together those that you need to have with you and the information ahead of time. Then, just some brief comments as time allows on adjuncts and alternatives. Although we talk about earth science there's some great things you can do with soil, water or meteorology. I often lament the fact that kids don't go out and take weather forecasts. They don't go out to take the temperature, wind direction, and what type of clouds there are anymore. We didn't put astronomy down here but I was additionally lamenting the fact the other night. It was a very, very clear night and many kids just have never seen the Milky Way. There's so much light, even in smaller communities, destruction of the sky, light pollution, if you will, that you just don't see the Milky Way anymore.

Dr. Deb: We don't think of that in Preston County because we see it all the time. Here in Morgantown you would definitely have that problem.

Dr. Bob: Topographic maps. The cost of topographic maps is relatively substantial. A couple bucks a piece, more than a couple bucks these days. You want to work with them with care. They come in paper form. You can get them from the Geologic Survey and you can order things directly through the web site at the Survey that you accessed before. They are rather big and unwieldy. One other thing that is a possibility, if you're at a RESA Center and they have a laminating machine, take some of these in and laminate them, Later in the show I'll show you a geologic map that we did this to. It makes it a little bit hard to use in the studio because of the glare off of the plastic. But they can use wax pencils, or washable ink pens and write on them and do some work on them and then you can just clean them off and they'll last for a good long time. The entire sheet, this is the common size, and you can see the color is going to be important on this topographic map. I'm going to fold it and there are a variety of ways that you can fold it. One possibility, if you have an alphabetical file folder and just limit the number of maps for your area, you might fold it in half and then in thirds. Or, sometimes I just take the map and I fold it so that there are two locations for the name of the map. You can see in the upper right hand corner there I kept the name of the quadrangle. That allows you to access that very nicely and then you might fold the rest of this in thirds in an accordion type fold. Then you can file them in an 11 x 14 file folder, one of those pouches. It keeps them fairly good shape except for the fact that their creased. If you laminate them you will probably have to keep them flat. You can roll them but it's almost better if you did have one big drawer to keep them flat. If you don't maybe have a counter top area or maybe a cardboard box on top of the counter top that will hold them.

Dr. Deb: The teachers, if they write in to the West Virginia Geological Survey on letterhead will get a discount. Generally, that's at least 10%. If you talk to Tom he might be able to get you a little bit more off.

Dr. Bob: I often suggest that you at least have the quadrangle where the school is. If the school is not too new, if the school is more recent then the map, of course, you're not going to be on there but you can still use it. Can students find out where the school should be based on other landmarks.

(Goes to topographic map) This particular topographic map is of a Parkersburg area. In the lower right hand corner is some pertinent information. The critical information here is the name of the quadrangle and the year in which the quadrangle was printed. This happens to be one of the newer maps, it has a bar code on it. Even though it is 1994 we did have the bar code, not all the maps have the bar codes. You can see that there is a use of color. The blue is for waterways, ponds, reservoirs, rivers, lakes, the ocean. The pink is just a broad color to demonstrate that there are so many houses there that it would be rather difficult and very cluttered to try with the little dark, black square for each and every building to try to portray the actual urban area. Urban areas are in pink. Major highways are in red. Four lane roads or recent roads would be in this purple. You can see that there are state boundaries. It's great to have a map of the Ohio River area, maybe one out of every quadrant in the state. One along the river and adjacent to Ohio. One in the eastern panhandle showing parts of Maryland or Pennsylvania and Virginia as well as the area in and around Charles Town or Harpers Ferry, a great map. You can see then that you can start having some fun in the classroom to find out who has jurisdiction, legally, over the surface water in the Ohio River. Let them work with this and struggle with this. So that they find out that the State of West Virginia has a responsibility over the surface water. It turns out, although this map does not show it, that the mineral rights under the river are under the jurisdiction of the State of Ohio. If there is an underground mine in an area, after any natural resource, or if there proves to be a natural resource there, that then belongs to the State of Ohio and they would obtain all rights and benefits, thereto, for the mining, the taxation, the value of the natural material. The green overlay is for forest. Lots of times folks thinks it just vegetation but it's forested because there is vegetation in these other areas. But it has been cleared land. It may be crop land, or may just be grassland now but it's cleared. One can only imagine what this must have been like to the first European coming into the area when there was no clearing unless there had been a very recent forest fire. It was a very dense wooded terrain by the time they came in, say in July or August, almost impenetrable because of the greenbrier and the thickness of the underbrush. You can see here that the contour lines give you some indication, very few contour lines, it looks white with great spacing between the contour lines to demonstrate the elevation in Ohio. This whole area might not be flood plain but at one time it was all a response to deposition in a river system. The river had cut a valley in post glacial days and with all the glacial debris it filled up in that valley. Now it's cutting back down to the extent that we allow it and the reason there is such a wide swath of water here is because we've put locks and dams for navigation purposes all along the river. Therefore we have stopped the effective flow and the real day to day dynamics have shut down in river building and valley building. We talked about that in the adjunct as the terraces and the effects of the rivers. You can see that that river made a very sharp bend to go to the west and then there's an island, Blennerhassett Island of historic value.

Right at the base there is a legend of sorts. The legend gives several ways to look at the scale. By miles, by feet, or by kilometers. You have to keep your wits about you as you read these things because as an example, in the middle scale there is the zero and there's a thousand scales off one end of the zero in fifths. So it's 200 foot intervals and then it goes from zero back to a thousand and to count up. This total length is 8,000 feet. You just have to keep yourself in tune as to what the scales are attempting to show you. I was commenting on the contour interval. Between each set of dark brown lines, a very dark brown line for every 5th line, it's a contour. Deb will show you in a moment some ways in which you can do that in the classroom. The contour interval is 20 feet except where it's dashed because there is such low topography on Blennerhassett Island that it's a 10 foot contour interval. Zooming in to Blennerhassett Island we can see that there's a little dashed line. The dark line indicates that that is an elevation of 600 feet. Within that line, it's about 600 feet. This little circle here is again 600 feet but because the topography is so low on Blennerhassett Island, it is after all an accumulation of sand in the river, the elevation is done at a 10 foot contour and at 590 feet. Now most of the quadrangles that you would get for your school area are going to be 20 feet. Some of you live in areas, especially in the southern part of the state, where it's a 40 foot contour interval. If you have a map like that it's going to be very difficult later on to really use that effectively to talk about the flooding in your area. We're going to show you some tricks that you might get into. Contour area and contour lines, a brown line, and since it's an even hundred, it's a little bit darker. If I were to show you a bit here, you see that there are lighter lines between the dark lines and every fifth line is made purposely a bit darker and that's the only one that has the elevation written on it, from time to time. Since you know it's a 20 foot contour interval, this line has to be 700 and that has to be 600. Just barely visible adjacent to that pattern. See what that pattern is? A straight line with little cross ties, that's a diagrammatic representation of railroad. Then there's this benchmark. This is a precise elevation surveyed in. It could have been surveyed in by the United States Geologic Survey. My guess is, it's probably surveyed in by some navigation component or even the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. It doesn't necessarily have to be belonging to the just the U.S. Geologic Survey to be put on this map. On the older disks it will even give the absolute elevation. It will also say who put it in. On newer disks, fortunately there are fewer of these, there's a code number and you have to get a book and find out what the elevation is. It's no fun. It can be very valuable and useful if you're working in that area. Let's look at some additional things. There's the River Hill Ch. It's a little square blackened area with a cross. That's a church. There, the dashed line is a cemetery. Each of the squares is an individual building. Let's build for a moment on this topography. Deb, why don't you take over and talk to us and show us what you have done and what could be done in the classroom with topography and contour lines.

Dr. Deb: Sure. There are quite a few things you can do in the classroom with the students and contour lines. One way of translating a contour line into a simple model is by having the students take the contour lines and then tracing and blowing up the topographic map and then tracing them out on cardboard. You might be if you are in a steep topography use just the index contours. That's what I used to do in Preston County because we would be doing itty bitty contour lines. You have to realize that there is an exaggeration here. In other words, we don't have the same horizontal scale as we do vertical scale. You have to mention that to the students that there is an exaggeration associated with this. It's not the greatest of models but what it's trying to do is get them to see that this line or contour line translates to an elevation and when you turn it on it's side you can see that these elevations get progressively higher. That's one way of doing it in the classroom. I've seen people use a clear shoebox and put a mold of some type in there, sometimes it's an island, sometimes it's a volcano. Then you fill up a centimeter at a time with colored water. At the top you trace then where the water intersects, or rises up to meet that model. As you raise the water 1 centimeter then these concentric circles close on themselves and you have another type of topographic map. That's one way of translating. Another way might be to do life-size contours outside. You pick an arbitrary point or if you have a benchmark near your school you use that and then have the students use hand lenses and rulers to mark off life-size contours at whatever contour interval you establish. They use yarn or flagging and mark those off on the school yard if you have a hill or a gully or something nearby which you can use. Most schools do. That's another good way of illustrating that. We can't go into a lot of detail on that but it was published in "Science Teacher" magazine. Tom Repine does this with the RockCamp teachers every year and he visited Wellsburg Middle School with Debbie Rockey's students and has published this life size or constructed contour activity in "Science Teacher" magazine. We have those in booklets that many of you facilitators have. If you don't have that and you want to get a copy of that we'll try to get it posted on the web or get a copy to you if you request one.

Dr. Bob: What grade was this?

Dr. Deb: Eighth grade. There's a nice scoring rubric in there as well that Debbie Rockey constructed for use with this activity. It's the whole thing of translating this idea that a line on that paper represents a elevation and that these lines if they're close together imply a steep elevation. They're farther apart, a more shallow gradient. They can see that by looking at how close their tapes are together or how closely spaced these lines happen to be on this model.

Dr. Bob: Is that pretty hard cutting that corrugated cardboard?

Dr. Deb: Yeah, as you can see this is pretty chewed up. I'm not particularly fond of giving kid's exacto blades. My high school kids used exacto blades in that foam board and that worked really well. Cardboard is really hard to work with. Although, James Giles has given the kids, fifth graders I believe, exacto blades using the proper safety precautions and they've done this Cropperneck (sp.). It can be done with the younger kids. You just have to supervise them and he's braves then I am. I was worried about the high school kids. If you establish your safety criteria well in advance, at the beginning of the school year, your students respect you, of course, you really have very little to worry about. It's more overreaction then anything.

Dr. Bob: That really helps them to reflect upon the contour intervals, the thickness of the material. That's what you have to get across to them. The concept of scale that if it's 20 feet between contour intervals and you're using something a quarter of an inch thick, you realize that 20 feet along the length of the topographic form is a lot different scale. You always find scale listed at the bottom of the topographic map. I'll point out that the scale is given as a representative fraction. What this means is that one unit on the map, no matter what the scale is, it could be the distance between my knuckles, is 24,000 of the same units on the ground. The reduction is that 1:24,000. It could be shown as a representative fraction, actually 1 over 24,000 and 1:62,500 is a smaller scale and that's almost an inch to a mile. That's a great little task for fifth graders on. They ought to be able to handle that. How many inches are actually in a mile? When you work that out you find out that's not 62,500, it's 63,300 and 60 or something like that. You say, "Why on Earth did they decide to use 62,500?" 62,500 is a really useful scale because if you double it what do you get? Double it again and again. You can even talk about a 1:1,000,000 scale. These are the typical scales that you'll see on maps depending upon what you want to portray, are you doing a whole country? Do you want to easily fold it up and put it into the glove box so that you can travel with it? Or do you want to have greater detail? The 24,000 map is also called the 7.5' quadrangle or quad for abbreviated purposes. What that means is that that rectangular piece of paper, 7.5' minutes of latitude, 7.5' minutes of longitude. The reason it isn't square, of course, in these sheets for the State of West Virginia is because we are north of the Equator. We're about 40, give or take 38 to 40 in that range, north of the Equator. Therefore, the parallels of latitude don't change but the meridians of longitude are starting to come to closure, eventually, at the North Pole so you keep getting a skinnier and skinnier map as you go north and it gets a little bit chubbier until if, theoretically if there was a quadrangle at the equator, it would be a perfect square where 7.5' minutes of latitude and 7.5' of longitude are exactly the same absolute length in terms of miles or meters or whatever unit of measure you wish to do.

Dr. Deb: Why did they choose 24 instead of 31,250?

Dr. Bob: As a matter of fact, during the war there was some 31,250. Nobody remembered that at all. Somebody, some bureaucrat somewhere, I'm sure just decided it's going to be a nice even number, it's going to be 24,000.

There are many additional things on the topographic map. I want to show you a corner of the map. In every one of the corners you'll find latitude and longitude so that the latitude, in this case is north, is 3915'N of the Equator..(Points to a church on the map) There's another church. As you can see that that church has a little extension to it. The dark colors, the black filled in is an exact portrayal of the footprint of the church at the time that this map was made. It had that little extension out back. This is 81 37 30. If we went to the top of this map and added 7.5' minutes you then would be able to predict what the latitude of the northern part of the map is. 7.5' with 15' is 3922.5'. So it's 7.5' of latitude and 7.5' minutes of longitude. In each corner as well as in the center of each side it will tell you what quadrangle you need to find if you want the adjacent quadrangle. You can sometimes find the topographic maps without the green overlay. If you have need for that you have to ask for it when you're ordering. There's lots of additional things on here. There are different units of measure to determine where you are in surveying type styles. These numbers we'll not get into now but there is one for the State of Ohio. There's one set for the State of West Virginia and there's this latitude and longitude and then there's a Universal Transverse Mercator. This number has a special meaning as to the number of meters north of the Equator. It's probably 435, it's a lot of meters north. Many, many, many meters north. All that's going to change is the big number. You can also see, in the State of Ohio, that there is a box work. This is the township and range system. After the surveying that old G.W. did way back when, the state's that came into the Union after that had the township and range system as part of their nomenclature. In the State of West Virginia does not have township and range as part of the surveyed system even though we are a state that did not come about until the late 1800s, it is grandfathered into the State of Virginia and therefore, we did not have that surveying system way back then. Lot's of additional things can be obtained. There's oil wells, unimproved roads, a jeep trail that goes into a quarry. There are lots of symbols, a little crossed x and a pick for quarry, some traditional symbols that you can find. You can get a symbol diagram and we'll get a copy out to everybody. For the interpretation for all of the features. We're not going to go over all of them now. Topographic maps are great if you are doing historical work. If you're doing cultural activities. If you have an old map from 1850, how is Parkersburg changed in growth, in shape? Which way did it grow? You can't tell the population density but you can surly suggest which way the town has changed. The only situation is that you'll have to use a different scale map because they did not map at the 7.5' scale late in the 1800s. Those were all 15' maps or 30' maps. Those terms, 15', means 15 minutes of latitude and 15 minutes of longitude. That would be a great quiz question, wouldn't it? How many 7.5' quadrangles are needed to cover the same area that a 30' quadrangle covers? How many 7.5' quadrangles for a 15'? Think about that. Draw a picture to make a simpler problem.

Well, many uses. You can get the data off the topographic map and there are topographic maps to access. Deb, you've got quite a few of those available on the web site.

Dr. Deb: As a matter of fact, we do. So, you're saying to us, "We can't afford to buy all those topographic maps and how are we supposed to do all those topographic map activities?" We've got the solution for you and I'm so thrilled with this site. I'm going to give you the address: www.topozone.com

What you get when you do a search is a 1:100,000 map. You can then center the map and zoom into 1:50,000 and see something that looks more like a topographic map. It looks fuzzy and not as good as a topographic map that you would buy at the Survey but it's free. You can still make out the symbols. I printed out a copy on my printer and as you see it looks like a topographic map with a little fuzz. You can make out a cemetery there, you've got a benchmark.

Dr. Bob: What are these? These purple, lot's of what use to go on in Preston County and many other places. I say in the past tense because the coal industry is down in Preston County and out and many places. This is an old abandoned surface mine area.

Dr. Deb: Those of course, being purple, means this has been photorevised. Some of those aren't abandoned, they were actually in progress. I think they have been reclaimed since then. It happens to be just adjacent to where I live. As you can see from this, by accessing Topozone, you can see that you can accomplish the same things. If you're in a pinch and you can't get the topographic maps right away and you can stretch it out over several years and finally get them you can access this site.

Dr. Bob: In this one they identified through color code that it was 1:25,000. It's amazing to me that you can access all this material free. No charge. Play with it.

Dr. Deb: I want to show you another web site that gives you a really nice CD-Rom. It's called www.delorme. It's the same people that do the gazetteer books.

Dr. Bob: You can get those at WalMart everywhere, bookstores, hunting and fishing places if you don't want to buy the full topographic map. It's about $15.95. You'll get total coverage of topography for the state of West Virginia on the large format book. It's a great publication.

Dr. Deb: If you want this on a CD-Rom it is available, called Topo U.S.A. from Delorme. You can get a better copy then Topozone gives you but it's a matter if you want the expense or not. Those are a couple of options then for accessing topographic maps on the computer.

Dr. Bob: We'll show you later on some additional sites, National Geographic, and some others. For now, I want to do one other thing to demonstrate to you what can be done with a topographic map. That is to make a cross section of the topography. We have taken a hypothetical segment with the contour lines and on the map north is always pointing up. So you always keep that orientation unless there's something special that you want to do. You have a scale. The scale does not have units to it, that's not the important thing. What is important in this diagram is that the contour lines are following in this hillside...and here's the stream. My first question to you is...Which way does the stream flow? This is something that you should be able to immediately understand. Think back. When you are walking in a stream and you don't want to lose elevation. You want to stay at the same elevation you have to walk upstream to cross it and then come back downstream on the other side. This line and this line are exactly the same elevation. If you straight between these two points, you'd have to go down into the valley and then back up. A stream, a topographic map, is such that the contour lines are going to show a "V" upstream. The flow is in the blue arrow, the sense of the blue arrow and then the contour lines we say show a "V' in the upstream direction.

Dr. Deb: A really nice way of presenting that to the students is that they can figure out that water flows down hill. So they look first to see where the contour lines are and what they're doing. From there you can take them to observe what the contour lines do when they cross the stream.

Dr. Bob: One thing you'll find is that those youngsters in the class who have done a lot of hunting and fishing, a map is a second nature to them. The others in the class who haven't done anything like that really, they just cannot immediately see these features. It sometimes happens that maybe one of your youngsters, who is an avid hunter, has not been real keen about learning in the classroom. If you paired that up with an individual who has been keen about learning in the classroom but doesn't know a thing about hunting and they start working together and they share their strengths. It's really exciting when they start playing with these topographic maps. Even in college in an introductory course in geology, they just flounder. Especially the ones majoring in music, the theater, or the arts. They should have a perspective if they're working in the arts but they really have trouble seeing the interpretation of a 3 dimensional feature, the topography, the lay of the land, on a flat sheet of paper. The last comment here. What you do is you're interested in creating the topographic profile, the cross section. The cross section will be taken between A and B. You bring the A down there and the B down there. You have a set of lines and the interval between those lines is the contour interval. In this case the contour interval is every 20 feet. The numbers are read directly off the map. In this case they put it way down close to sea level for simple sake. If you were doing this up in Preston County you'd probably have an 1800 foot or 2000 foot or whatever contour line. Still the contour interval would be 20 feet.

Dr. Deb: You can do this with your own topographic map. You don't have to use the textbook published versions. You can just Xerox a copy off and blow it up a little bit.

Dr. Bob: Hopefully, after a while, they'll just see that and say you go down and then come back up and it's rather symmetrical. There doesn't seem to be a very steep slope and a very shallow slope. You can almost begin to visualize by the end of the exercises.

Dr. Deb: One thing we mentioned that you have to remember that you can either reduce or blow up, enlarge, a contour map and do this profile of someplace near your school very easily. If you do that make sure you take the bar scale from the bottom of the topographic map and superimpose that on the map so that when you enlarge the map it enlarges the scale and so you have a better estimation of what the scale is. You can't use the old scale if you enlarge the map.

Dr. Bob: That's one of the tricks for the flood type analysis. You might just want to enlarge the topographic map that you have in order to maybe get an idea of where the flood level was. The basemap is what this topographic map becomes when we put an overlay on it of the information of the geology. Then it becomes a geologic map. I'd said earlier that I had a map of the geology of one of the old county reports. This is 1929. The paper itself is just so fragile. It's good old Pocahontas County. The paper is so fragile that it cracks and breaks. But on a good color Xerox, the Survey has one, this came out magnificently. Here's Deercreek Valley and a little bit further on down the way, see this big yellow splotch, they're using colors to portray the different types of rocks and earth materials. Yellow is always portrayed as the soft unconsolidated material deposited during the Quaternary in riverbeds, alluvium. In a moment I'll show you why Quaternary alluvium is recognized on the geologic map immediately by it's color, yellow, and by the Qal, Quaternary alluvium. What town is in this area? There's Arborvale and Green Bank. A beautiful map of the Green Bank area. Here's the Greenbrier River. This little Deer Creek is not a real great size river but it has a huge patch of Quaternary alluvium. There's something we need to learn from the geologic map. Additionally, you notice that there are additional colors, later I'll talk about the symbolism on the map and then in this area I'm zooming in on there's some red lines. These red lines are some pretty high contour lines. It seems to be contoured, there's a 4600, another orange one, then there's 4,400, a 4,300. Those are bases, those are the lines on a certain coal unit. These dark blue lines are also certain coal units, SW, Sewickley, HF, different letters of the alphabet to help portray. In this area, very close by Green Bank but not in Green Bank, you find the rocks that contain the coals. Just to the west, it's not very far away at all. The geologic map portrays things in color, also in a pattern. Sometimes there's a pattern to portray the different rocks. You'll usually some sort of a geologic column then and perhaps a key to what they might be. A pattern of dots for example might well be a sandstone. It looks like sand grains. Short dashed lines, shale. Another box pattern, either completely filled in a brick like structure, that's limestone. Another possibility some of the sand grains and some near circles, that's a conglomerate. Kind of looks like a conglomerate. Certain colors throughout the states and North America, at least for the United States they try to use yellow, almost always, for Quaternary. Other colors may or may not be the same, you have to look at the legend that they share with you. Then, there are simple patterns that you need to know. The patterns given by both capital and lower case letters. This symbol is an age of the rocks. This happens to be Precambrian. Then the C with a slash through it, this is the Cambrian. There's a major geologic time break, we're now from here on up we're talking about the Paleozoic, the ancient life. Capital O for Ordovician, S for Silurian. The names derived from European features for the first part, D for the Devonian, Devonshire. Then in North America we have an M and a P with a double vertical brace, the Mississippian and the Pennsylvanian but worldwide these two together would just be capital C with no line through it. That's the carboniferous. It's the coal measures around the world. Then the Permian, another letter P with a short slash in the vertical. That completes the Paleozoic. In the State of West Virginia on the old geologic maps you will see some Precambrian but most of the rocks will be the Cambrian, Ordovician, Silurian, Devonian, Mississippian, Pennsylvanian, Permian. Youngest at the top, oldest at the bottom. Continuing on, after the Paleozoic comes the Mesozoic, the middle life. There are only three periods here, the combination for Tr, Triassic, J for Jurassic, and here a departure, the letter K for the German word for the Cretaceous. The Latin word from which that is derived means chalk. For the symbols on maps worldwide by convention they use the capital letter K and that's the time of the dinosaurs. The more recent, depends, in America you see Tertiary and then Quaternary. Then building on these capital letters you'll see one or two lower case letters, not more than two, very seldom would you see more than two. In West Virginia if I were to show you a map and it had a St or an older may might have a Stc or really older map might not even call it Silurian. It's the oldest most rock unit at the base of the Silurian by our common nomenclature and the t stands for, comes from the fact that's it's the Tuscarora unit. It turns out to be a sandstone, abbreviated ss and they take either the first letter or the tc and that then, on any WV map, it's the Tuscarora sandstone of Silurian age. That's the way we do these types of things. The symbols of the geologic maps. From the geologic maps you can interpret not only the nature of the geology and the structure, but also what rocks you're working with and what you might have to work with. Where you may go to find certain units.

Well, we had extended a bit longer in the topographic maps and it's really long here.

Dr. Deb: If you want to see the topographic map symbol sheet the address is www.lib.berkeley.edu\eart\digital\legend.html

Here's what you'll see if you go to that site and this is the topographic symbol page that you would get from the U.S. Geologic Survey. It is on the web. You can see the different grades of roads here, the different colors, the streams, swamps, etc.

Dr. Bob: Orchards are always neat too, because their green pattern with little green dots all in a neat rectangular pattern. Just as if you were to fly over it and look down and see these perfectly planted trees.

As you can see on the outline, this is where we are. We only finished through the geologic map. Let us take a quick break here and come back and reorganize. The Powers of Ten was going to be short anyway. The collecting is also a brief comment.

BREAK

Dr. Bob: I kept hopes and desires that kids get to magnify things. What I have in my hand is a relatively inexpensive apparatus, it's a single hand lens. It's just one lens and only 10x magnification. Even if they come with two 10x to do 20x or as a single 20x, you don't need it. The power of 10 is fantastic. All I've done is put an old shoelace through the apparatus and to be worn over the neck. I know how difficult it is to get equipment. Many classrooms I've been in, it's just a simple piece of plastic with the plastic magnifier you hold in the old fashion way, super. Anything to start magnifying. Looking at an ant, a fly, a leaf, a twig, salt crystals, then a rock, a fossil. Something that's a little bit too small and 10x does wonders. In your classroom did you have microscopes or was that hard to come by?

Dr. Deb: Actually we had both hand lenses and microscopes and so I was the biology teacher as well as the earth science teacher. I had a corner on the market. However, I didn't often use the microscopes with the rock samples because they over magnified. We had the real fine microscopes, the dissection scopes work a lot better for that. You don't want to get on those microscope stages. We tended to use the hand lenses and dissection scopes.

Dr. Bob: Actually you don't get the depth of field if you have high power. A very simple binocular microscope, if it can be afforded. In Forestry Supplies Inc. a simple hand lens in lots of 1-11 costs 7.65 each. Then there are some folding ones in plastic, even those get to be a bit more expensive and you don't need multiple lenses. We can find some other areas and booklets where you can cut down the cost on this. The powers of ten are very, very critical and all you have to do is go 10x and then 100x. Going in the other direction, realize in working the topographic maps, we have reduced things. We have gone 1/10th or 1:1,000,000. We can work in mathematics and scale and especially on the powers of ten. There is a video from the Smithsonian that takes you on an interesting trip. You start out at a picnic at the beach in Chicago and then you go back out to space and then you come back and focus in on the skin cell. It's a magnificent movie.

Dr. Deb: The movie, The Power of Ten, is available for $50 some odd dollars and is 12 minutes long. It's pretty pricey.

Dr. Bob: There's a book on the Power of Ten that has just the still pictures. That's what we wanted to really emphasize that working in geology with the powers of ten is extremely important.

Our next item was collecting, that's why you have the magnification because you're collecting rocks. Sometimes if you collect the rocks, put a label on it or in it's own plastic bag. It doesn't have to be elegant. Take a magic marker that will write on anything and then put a code number down or your initials and the year 2000. Then also have that information and put it in a book and make an entry. Note that you collected, for example, 12-00 or your initials, and you collected that on the 22nd day of February in the year 2000, note you think it is sandstone but when you get back to the lab you're going to work on it in greater detail. When you get it back to the lab you might want to paint a number on it. A little white paint on it and again with a fine point permanent marker put some other code number or the same code number on that and you hope it doesn't get scraped off over the years of handling.

Dr. Deb: Some of the resealable or reclosable bags make bags that you can write on. They have a little white band. You can put additional information where you found it, something you can't fit on the rock. If you're afraid that you might lose track of your notebook corresponding to that bag you could record it in both places or number the bags and correspond that to your notebook. I highly recommend those.

Dr. Bob: Notice that I have this stick person coming up and it's not a very high exposure. You really have to be careful as to how high you want them to go. Maybe there's several different rocks and then if you have your ruler or your measuring stick of some other magnitude then you collect unit 1 and unit 2 and unit 3. You keep those isolated and then in your notebook you'll draw and put some numbers in here and you'll collect information. Kid's will do this great. If you take a simple piece of tag board and a couple pieces of graph lay them together carefully, staple them twice in the middle and fold them in half and it's their own field book. They label as My Field book. They go on a little field trip even though it may just be around the school. They keep notes, they may collect the gravel in the parking lot and that sort of thing and look carefully because you might often find fossils. So the collecting of fossils are done the same way. You may have lots of fossils here and nothing there and nothing there. This may be a limestone and you use that same rock pattern, this may have been a shale and it just didn't have anything in it and this perhaps was a sandstone and if there were any shells they all dissolved away by chemical weathering. It was in the limestone that they really preserved and found the fossils. This isn't going to happen every time behind the school but it's just used as an example as to what could happen and how you could be more formal in a true geologic way in gathering this information. I'd also point out the things you don't collect. If you go to a stream you can collect sand and gravel, but after a flood do not collect the overbank flood material because bacterial growth in that mud and silt and clay is very common. During the flood this past weekend it flooded out the sewage treatment plant and raw sewage was then going into the water. This happened all down the Mon River in our territory all the way to Pittsburgh. If you note, people cleaning up in their homes are wearing good sturdy rubber gloves not just those real flimsy gloves. A good sturdy neoprene glove and are using gallon after gallon of bleach. Don't have your students collect the silt and clay. It's so tempting. We'll talk in a few moments how you can note how high the water level was and actually measure what the flood did. In the context of collecting rocks and minerals you might even collect soil. I know that Debbie Rockey takes cylinders and actually makes soil profiles out of them. You have to be a little careful with soil too, they can get a little rank after a while because you have some organic matter. If you dry it out.

Dr. Deb: She uses play sand and tempera paints. It's clean. She doesn't have to worry about it getting rank.

Dr. Bob: It's a lot like rock art with the sand.

Dr. Deb: Or you can take little film canisters and collect samples of sand from different places and then come back to the lab and compare them with a hand lense. With hand lenses you can see differences very easily.

Dr. Bob: So any other collecting thoughts you had?

Dr. Deb: One more thing, we did locate a web site that you can get on. This one is a lot shorter. www.djminerals.com If you've ever been to RockCamp the mineral and rock samples come from D.J. Minerals. They now have their web site.

Dr. Bob: Indeed, the minerals that we're getting together as we speak, the igneous rocks.

Dr. Deb: The igneous rocks are coming from them. Their web sites had those plastic hand lenses listed some for 99 cents, some for 1.15 all the way up to $10.00 each. Depending on your budget and what you're trying to accomplish there's a price range there for everybody. A rock or a mineral sample kit might cost you $5.00.

Dr. Bob: Many, many schools use the Ward catalog to buy materials. They have an excellent distribution type center. We always urge you, especially in West Virginia, compare and contrast prices, and if you're able to work with the smaller size pieces then because of the budget restrictions that quite often exist out there. It's very uneven, we understand that. The more types of things you have for the youngsters to get their hands on the better it is. Magnifiers and samples that they've collected, even just stones from the driveway, just watch out for traffic. Whenever you're near the Greenbrier limestone you stand a chance of finding fossils. Unfortunately you need to refresh that from time to time. If you try to use it year after year you will hydrate out. It's good fun and it really can be appropriate.

To find the flood line along a stream look where the leaves have washed up to or unfortunately it's also plastic, paper and cups and all sorts of debris. On the surface you'll find a layer of mud and silt, sometimes there's a zone not quite up to where the leaves were and then maybe there's some way that the youngsters, by the line of sight, could determine in the general sense how high that flood was. What instrument might you need?

Dr. Deb: Well, you could use something like this type of ruler situation and a hand level. What this has is a leveling device, a little bubble, and the students look through the eye piece and a student might sit at river level and then sight on a student holding one of these rulers and works like you're surveying. You get about the same results.

Dr. Bob: This type of exercise to also look for the maximum flood level, is the type of thing we do as geologists, in order to find the historic floods. For example, looking in our neighborhood, the Mon River flowing north meeting the Allegheny River in Pittsburgh, the Allegheny wasn't in flood. We got that storm and the Allegheny did not. Therefore, the Mon River came up in flow and where the Mon and Allegheny meet it's renamed the Ohio River. But, the Mon River has such discharge that that discharge literally blocked the flow coming in from the Allegheny and therefore, additionally, the great discharge in the Mon Valley within the banks and out of bank flow moved up into the Allegheny. It just dammed that water and then the Allegheny starts backing up and responds to the flood. The highest level is always in the Mon River. The Allegheny River never has as high a flood level as the Mon River did until such time that the Allegheny gets a lot of its water. In those circumstances then you get a situation when it gets into the Ohio River then more and more water comes together. It is accommodating a greater volume. Then the flood levels move on down as a surge all the way down the Ohio but it was not as great a flood as it was individually on the Mon River. In Hurricane Agnes, that hurricane looped around so that the response time for flood in the Mon River matched the response time for flood in the Allegheny River. When they met in Pittsburgh it was high water for sure. The great floods in the city of Pittsburgh, for example, are those situations where the storm has hit in each basin such that the maximum discharge from the Allegheny and the Mon River meet at the point very close in time. Then it's a real major flood system.

Last week, Deb, we talked about particles and fluids in motion and how particles are moved. I'd like to move to the next part of the section that we're going to talk about. I have here a set of 6 sieves. Their plastic and you can see through this. It has a screening in here. This has a very widely spaced screen and it's according to a particular size of grain according to what geologists use for differentiating between sand, silt, and clay. All of these sieves that you see first, if particles come through here it's a sand-sized particle. It costs about $70.00 for the entire set of sand-sized sieves. You can put them together and take them out into the field and gather the sediments. It also comes with a plastic top and it also comes with a pan to catch all the silt and clay that might have been located in that particular sample. You put the nest of sieves together and drop a sample in. You can take the individual samples out by particle size. You compare and contrast them. You might dry them and weigh them using a simple gravimetric system. The material here is very fine sand, medium sand, coarse sand, and very coarse sand. In this upper sieve protects the rest of the sand sized sieves. This one happens to be a gravel size or granule as it's called in geology. I have brought along three samples. This is a very coarse sand. Those are pretty good sized individual pieces. These are individual grains and that's very coarse sand. After you get the very coarse sand, then you can use your hand lens to see why some of them are light and some are dark. Then you have the medium sand. This is significantly different. What we have done also with this in one of the earlier additional CATS courses, we made little cards out of this. We glued these particles down once we had separated them. Then the students can have this card to work with in their groups. These grains are much smaller, that's medium sand.. Even for medium sand that's pretty fine grained. I'm going to get the very fine sand and that really has a soft feel to it. It's really hard, even with this magnification, to get the impression that there are light grains and dark grains in here. But that is dramatically different then the very coarse sand. I suggest to you that if you collect after a flood, well after a flood, you collect some river sample, maybe even treat it with a little bit of bleach, you could have some very interesting comparisons about your river and maybe share some of that sediment with somebody else. Or share it with a school in Arizona that might have a sand dune or out at the beach at the eastern shore. You might get someone from Dare County, North Carolina, who would be more then happy to share the beach sands, outside the national park and national monument and the wildlife barrier, but in the regular areas. Just get some of their sand and compare and contrast it. Not only according to color but also according to particle size. That was the value of the particle size analysis.

When you're planning a field trip, what sort of things go through your mind immediately?

Dr. Deb: Cost.

Dr. Bob: Yep. Can I afford the bus.

Dr. Deb: Unfortunately that's your number one constraint. Then getting the appropriate chaperones, weather, hoping the weather cooperates.

Dr. Bob: By that time you've got the bus. Do you need an alternative plan? A pavilion nearby really helps. A rule of thumb...how many chaperones did you take?

Dr. Deb: I usually took about 1 chaperone per five students. But I could get away with less than that. I've actually helped chaperoned trips where there were two of us for 15 or 16. I wasn't the leader on that. I always feel more comfortable having more adults around just in case something happens. It gives you peace of mind.

Dr. Bob: Did you have an additional vehicle with it?

Dr. Deb: Just the school bus.

Dr. Bob: What other safety measures? Do you issue them hammers? If you have hammers you have to have safety classes.

Dr. Deb: You always have to make sure you have safety glasses with you and with strict instructions that they are to wear those. My rule of thumb was if you had a hammer you had glasses and if I caught you without safety glasses or goggles and the hammer you sat in the bus. You were not allowed, I was that strict. I was not willing to take any chances. If you were anywhere around that student you had to turn your back or you had to move away from them.

Dr. Bob: What did they have in the way of hammers? They didn't have the ones with the sharp points on them. They had brick layers hammers.

Dr. Deb: Yeah. Just one or two of those so that I could keep a constant eye on where they were.

Dr. Bob: Did you go to areas with big, high quarry walls?

Dr. Deb: Never.

Dr. Bob: I have problems taking teachers there sometimes. You really want to watch out. Run the field trip ahead of time. Even though you've been to the same locations year in and year out, you never know what the Department of Highways has done to you next. Also, whose land is it? Always get permission. With younger groups, a greater number of parents to come along as chaperones. A ratio of 1:4.

Dr. Deb: Unfortunately, most of our better rock collecting sites are along roads and you can't take students there. So you really have to find someplace where there is an outcrop at maybe a construction site or something that is stable enough to visit or is on some farmers land. You can't have students along a roadside running around with traffic.

Dr. Bob: Across the states as schools are built, I've always encouraged everyone to go out there, if you can get access to it, at an appropriate time when construction has quieted down or their doing finishing touches but before they have dressed off the slopes, go out and find out. Keep a record of what their digging through. Collect the samples. I have found that kids have no problem with imagination.

Dr. Deb: Often you don't have to leave the school grounds. There's always construction going on around the schools.

Dr. Bob: The first thing on all these trips...Think about safety! The second thing, do something about safety. Make it the safest trip possible. Third, pre run the trip. Know where you're going to go. Be comfortable where you're going to go. If nothing else, you know when the bridge isn't under construction and you can't get there from here.

Dr. Deb: The most important thing, I think, for a field trip is, don't take a bunch of kids out there and just talk to them. Don't take them someplace where a ranger is just going to talk to them or getting somebody from the Soil Conservation and they just talk to them. If you want a good active field trip you have to be just as hands on oriented in the field as you are in the classroom. Let them get their hands dirty.

Dr. Bob: Take your time when you're walking to and fro. Don't over plan the field trip and don't tell them how many stops you're going to have. My rule of thumb is...If they don't know how many stops you could have made, they'll think it's the complete trip when we get to the end. The end is the end. You are not a slave then to watching the clock and think you've got to get moving. When they're having a great time, let them, collecting or viewing. Look at things besides the rocks. To think of the holistic aspect of once you're outside, then they can talk, they can chatter, and it's really great. It's fresh air. You can get them to observe. Sometimes get down on their hands and knees. There's nothing better than to get that 10x power hand magnification. Say, "Have you ever wondered what that looks like down on the forest floor?" and get them down and actually looking at it.

Well, that was planning the field trip. Although we continually talked about rocks and fossils and the geology, we introduced the holistic aspect of it. There's so much more we can do. Did you ever get to do anything with soils, weather, or water sampling?

Dr. Deb: I actually taught a geology course so I didn't really get into weathering or meteorology but I did soils. I don't believe you can really do geology without talking about soils even though they are two distinctly different things. I had the Soil Conservation people, they were more than willing to come out and talk to the students about soil profiles. They'll actually dig a trench, but we didn't have to because I had my own. We talked about soils a good bit.

Dr. Bob: In working with soils, you're working with colors, you're working with texture. Run it between your hands maybe if you have the sieve set bring it back into the laboratory and work with it. But talk about the texture. Think about some of the main elements of that soil. When you come down you're looking at color. It's dark at the top. Why? Organic material. Most places in West Virginia where it has been forest in the past historically and it hasn't been under plow there's a gray horizon. Why is it gray? Below that it's a reddish or orangish horizon. What is the element that is making it red or orange? In that red or orange horizon you get one horizon that's real sticky or hard, even a hard pan, and that's one of the great things about these rural kids, they'll know those terms because they've used them before. You can start drawing out these great terms because while it is geology that is the parent material in some form and fashion, it is the weathering that creates the soil. The soil is a great addition.

Now, with respect to taking the weather forecast and actually forecasting weather or just looking at the clouds and measuring the precipitation, looking at the temperature...we don't have much of that anymore on the school yard.

Dr. Deb: They use to have little weather stations and now unfortunately we have the weather channel.

Dr. Bob: If you have it in your room you can use it. Have the earliest class take down the synoptic weather. What's happening to the average temperatures? When is the back of winter broken when you start seeing the minimum's climb and the maximum temperatures climb? Great for graphing.

The final thing is, what are some resource areas? You brought along this forestry suppliers.

Dr. Deb: This is where you can get the hand levels from. If you want a catalog I'm sure you can call them at the toll free number.

Dr. Bob: Ben Meadows is another company at www.benmeadows.com. Carolina Biological Supplies is another one. This is Forestry Suppliers. Many, many suppliers that you'll find in your advertisers in your science catalogs and in other things. This is a great wish book, many, many pages. It's much more material then you'll ever use or need because they're specialized.

So, we've reached the end of the class, take care. Next week we'll have adjuncts and we'll look at a variety of topics with respect to coal. We'll have Dr. Jack Renton back with us. We'll talk about coal mining, the mineral that coal is, acid mine drainage, and mine reclamation. Until then...take care. Deb and I will see you again in 2 weeks.

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

Page last revised: February 2000

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