Honolulu Community College

Program 1

INTRODUCTION TO THE COURSE


[Note: Due to technical problems this text does not conform exactly to the TV program. Hopefully this will be remedied in the near future. This transcript begins approximately 15 minutes into the program.]

Any one of us can only see a small fraction of the earth's surface in a lifetime and none of us will ever see the interior. The deepest wells ,the deepest mines only scratch the surface of the earth. So, we'll never probably see the earth's interior.

But, in little more than only a hundred years of systematic study of the earth, an astounding amount of information has been gathered about the materials, processes and relationships which shape our planet, and about which make it unique. In fact, geologists are now beginning to understand the planet on a global basis. The magnitude of this effort is tremendous.

The fact that any one geologist works on a very small area, but yet weÕre able to communicate to get a picture of the entire earth, surface and interior. But, most of us won't be geologists, or most of you won't be geologists, but everybody lives on the planet and everybody interacts with it in one way or another.

I can't stress the importance of how much we rely upon earth.

I can't stress this enough.

So, when you visit Kilauea Volcano or fly across the continent or walk on the beach or drive across the Koolaus to the windward side, you're influenced by common processes which have been occurring in the same way since the beginning of time according to very basic laws of chemistry and physics. So, by understanding how this planet works, we're not only satisfying our natural curiosity, but we increase our awareness of the fragility of the earth, the uniqueness of the earth, and we also begin to understand the importance of our careful stewardship of the earth's systems and its resources.

So, there are several objectives to the course.

In the syllabus I've separated these into general and specific objectives. Let me go over the general objectives with you first:

Some of this stuff I've already gone over a little bit, but I want to detail them for you here.

In other words, we want to see that the earth is a planet, works according to the same laws as everything else.

Whatever processes happen on the earth are governed, as I said earlier, by these physical and chemical laws. These physical and chemical laws are the same laws that apply to the moon, the sun, the other planets, to a nearby galaxy. In fact the same laws apply to the universe at large. We also, in this respect, want to learn to appreciate, then, the uniqueness of earth as a planet and its environment that sustains it.

You see, one of the things that fascinates me about the study of the earth is the fact that these same processes, these same physical laws, the law of gravity, the law of heat transfer, the laws of chemical properties of the elements work on the earth as every place else. But yet, the earth is such a unique place. I can't stress that enough, either--that the earth is a unique place.


There are specific objectives to the course as well and I want to detail these for you as well. So after completing this course you should be able to do the following things:

Some of these terms that I used in describing these objectives may not be familiar to you, but if you are getting the course material as you should, this material and these terms will become familiar to you as we progress.

The instruction for the course will be in the form of these video programs which emphasize the course material.

Because geology is such a visual science, we will use the PBS series, Earth Revealed, video programs are designed to emphasize and to supplement the assigned reading, not to replace it.

You can't expect to be successful in a course like this just by watching television.

I'll come back and talk about that a little bit more in a couple of minutes . In fact, why not talk about it now.

College courses require a significant amount of independent study.


A combination of in-class or program activities and out of class activities is required to assimilate the material. By assimilation, here, I mean more than memorizing just a set of facts.

We are often taught or we often learn science simply as a set of facts. But the facts by themselves don't mean anything. They have to be learned in context. So assimilating the course material means that you have the ability to make connections and to see relationships as well as to analyze this information and also to understand the facts and the vocabulary.

So, in general, these are the things that I would expect of you, a student in a course.

Now those two things are pretty easy.

You don't have to learn everything, you don't have to memorize everything, but you should be organizing the material in your mind.

Review the video program, compare it with the assigned reading and study until you understand the ideas; that is, until you can recognize the correct answers on the self test, until you have learned the learning objectives as stated in the study guide.

The way the exams are structured, if they come in to me late, I won't be able to grade them. So I can only accommodate the late exams under certain circumstances. So what I am telling you here is, take the exams on time. And get the exams back to me by the deadline.

Write clearly, legibly, and carefully. Cultivating the ability to communicate is an important part of the learning process and that's one of the reasons we attend college courses, to take in lots of information, digest analyze it and put it out into a form that makes sense and it shows that you have been able to learn something.


As far as the evaluation; that is your grade in the course:

The grades will be determined on a point basis on the four tests and the field trip report. (See the online syllabus for details)

Studying for the Course

I want to take a minute, or several minutes actually, to talk about how you might study for the telecourse. So, to complete the course you can't just watch the videos. We make it easy for you to get the material at home on your television, but we can't learn it for you. You have to do that for yourself. The videos are interesting by themselves and you can learn, much about our planet just from watching them, but they are not a substitute for reading and studying. The course material involves a lot more. In fact, typically a college course requires about two hours of independent study for each hour that you spend in class or in this case watching the program.

So, you should expect to spend about two hours on your own for each program. This is an average, some people may take less than that, some people may take more than that and there may be some programs where you don't have to spend the two hours, but in general, if you're spending two hours for each program that you watch, you're doing what's expected of you.

College courses require making connections and comparisons and extracting information from different sources.

After all that's what we're trying to teach in college courses is to take information from various sources and to put them together to synthesize, if you like, the information so that what you spit out or what you write or what you communicate, is a synthesis of the material that involves your own ideas as well as the ideas that you've been instructed.

The videos are useful in seeing examples of the features and the processes discussed in the text, but again, the videos will not give you all that you need in order to study.

Our portion of the television program is designed to guide your study and help you visualize the evidence which geologists use. The PBS series also introduces you to a large number of geologists, so you get a chance to see that geologists really are human, well, at least I think we're human, and get to see the evidence that geologists use in their work.

In the textbook, is where you find the details, the vocabulary, and the graphics. The text pictures are important ways to understand things. You may have been told that looking at pictures is not good and you're supposed to just read, well, I'm telling you here that looking at the pictures is probably one of the most important parts of a course like this. The pictures will help you understand many different things. It will help you know which things are important to study. It will show you how things are classified. They will give you descriptions, they'll give you relationships, and they will show you how things change with time. And again, time is a very important aspect of geology.

The study guide then elaborates on the material covered in the text and the videos.

It makes connections, if you like, between the text and the videos and helps you to synthesize this material. It also cites additional case studies and it is written in a little bit more narrative form so you can read it a little bit differently. In fact it reads more like a book or a newspaper that you might be used to reading.


In combination then with the video program, the text, and the study guide, the field trip will help you to see geology in the real world first hand.


COURSE GOAL

So, your goal or our goal in the program is to integrate the material from these various sources into a comprehensive understanding of how our planet works. 

Exams

Each of the four exams that you'll take will require you to know the important facts, but will also require you to know why the facts are important.

The exams will also require that you know how to make interpretations based upon models.

In other words, some of these exam questions will expect that you will have the facts, but you will be able to put those facts into a new context.

The processes and cycles, by the way, are also important. 

The first thing I want to talk about is studying science.

Science is not so different than other areas of human endeavor, but as I mentioned earlier, many people think that science requires just memorizing facts. You see facts are simply a way of describing and tying things together. Included with the idea of facts in science is a vocabulary.

You see, it doesn't do you any good just to sit down and memorize individual names or words, or definitions. They have to be understood in context.

In fact, names in geology are no different from everyday words that describe something. Everybody knows what a tree is, right? I use the word tree and an image comes to your mind. Not a particular kind of tree. If I were to say an acacia tree, that might give you a different kind of classification, but see nobody ever told you what a tree was. If you think back, can you ever remember somebody pointing to something and saying, this is a tree? Probably not.

So you have acquired as you learned the English language the notion or mental image of what a tree is.

If I was to describe to you to say a tree is a tall leafy plant with a woody stem and bark, then assuming that you know what a tall, leafy, plant, woody, stem and bark mean, then I can describe to you what a tree is.

So because you see trees every day in your familiar environment, you're familiar with what a tree is.

But suppose I was to use the word, playa.

Doesn't mean much probably, but if you live in a desert, you probably know that a playa is a dry flat -bottomed desert lake bed.

So you see when we're trying to talk about something in geology, if I'm trying to talk about a feature and I use the word, playa, the reason the word was invented in the first place is because it's much easier to say the word playa than it is to say, a dry flat bottomed desert lake bed every time I wanted to describe something.

Think about the word tree.

We name things in the first place to shorten the description of common things. And things that are common depend upon the environment that you're used to and the particular way that you go about your daily life.

If I was to say to you, the large, hairy animal climbed quickly up the tall, leafy plant with the woody stem and bark, it would be kind of confusing. Because it may be, with the way that sentence is constructed, it may be the large hairy animal that has the woody stem and bark. So what if I was to say the bear climbed up the tree.

You see by shortening that and using the words bear and tree in place of these descriptions, we get a much clearer picture and I think that you'd agree that saying that the bear climbed up the tree gives you a much better mental image of what I'm trying to communicate than to say the hairy animal climbed quickly up the tall leafy plant with the woody stem and bark.

So what we're trying to do here is to relate these new names to a visual image of the object, feature or process.

So when you are studying and you come across a new word, don't just memorize the word, try to look at the pictures in the book, look at the pictures in the video and get a sense of what the word really means so when you hear the word playa, you don't just memorize it as a dry flat bottomed desert lake bed, but you think of the feature itself.

The next thing that I want to look at is the idea of modeling.

Science, in many ways, consists primarily of modeling.

A model, as we use the term in science, is a system which behaves the same as the real world. The earth, like any complex system, is a complex collection interacting systems. It involves the earth, water, atmosphere, life, energy from the sun--all these things intricately connected.

So what scientists tried to do is to collect information about the world.

The information that we collect are called facts or data.

Then we have to make some reasonable assumptions.

A good example of this is one of the postulates of geology that makes a lot of sense.

In geology we recognize that when you have layers of sediments that the oldest sediments are on the bottom.

It makes perfect sense, doesn't it?

If you are going to deposit sediments, if you dump some dirt into water and the dirt settles down on the bottom, it has to land on something.

And that something that it lands on has to be older than the sediment. So we collect facts, we make some reasonable assumptions, then we analyze the information. We analyze the information by describing things, and by classifying things.

In descriptions we often have to invent words. To classify things we often put things together that look similar. Mountains all have certain things in common. Then sometimes we try to study processes in a controlled environment. That is, we go into the laboratory and we take a simplified version of the real world and we do things to it and see how it behaves. Then we try to project that back into the real world.

So we try then to relate one fact to another and sometimes we even have to quantify things. That is, we have to draw graphs, we have to write mathematical equations. We won't be doing much of the mathematical stuff in this class, that's for higher upper classes.

So a scientist puts all this together and builds a model based upon this analysis. The model isn't necessarily a physical model, its not necessarily like a model airplane where you glue the parts together, but it' a model where we look at all these different things together and try to see how it runs. In other words, we run this model using the information or the facts from the real world and simply compare the results with the real world.

When a model mimics the real world, we call it a theory. In fact we might describe a theory as a model which mimics reality to some given degree of approximation.

The goal in science is to approximate as closely as possible the real processes. So you see the text explains how these processes operate and the features that result from them. And the text, as we go through the course, will incorporate various models which try to simplify these real world systems.

So we have a model we call a rock cycle. We model which we call the hydrologic cycle. We have a model which we call convection cells in plate tectonics. And we try to understand the world then by seeing how it is that all of these individual processes fit together into one very complicated supersystem. That supersystem is what we call earth.

Did you ever think about gravity? We take gravity so much for granted!

Everybody knows that we have gravity. In fact, if you drop something, it falls to the floor. And in many cases gravity is simply a nuisance. It would be very handy, for example, if you dropped something and it stayed there and didn't fall to the floor and roll under the refrigerator or something.

But on the other hand, gravity is important. It sticks us to the earth. It makes things have weight.

The reason I ask you about gravity, you see, is because as we go through our geological studies, if you keep in mind that it's the interaction between gravity along with heat and water that's responsible for most of the geological processes.

Gravity is a subtle force that we can't really control. In fact, up until the middle sixteen hundreds nobody even knew what gravity was. Things still fell to the ground before Newton invented gravity, but the concept of the earth as an object which attracts things was invented by Isaac Newton.

The list of things that are influenced by gravity is enormous. Let me go through some of these with you. Just food for thought to think about for the next program as we go through the material.

Water has energy. As it flows down hill, it carves valleys, it dissolves rocks, it transports and deposits sediments which accumulate in layers at the bottom of what is water because of gravity.

These sediments preserve a record of their environment so that we can read them later in the rocks. The water gets its energy in the first place from heat from the sun.

Heat from the sun evaporates water from the ocean surface, lifts it into the upper atmosphere as a gas where it falls on mountain tops. So here we see an interaction between heat and gravity as far as water. Rocks and soil slide downhill. Seems like a simple enough statement.

But rocks that are on the edge if a cliff, if they become weak enough to fracture, will tumble down to the cliff and will accumulate at the bottom. Huge masses of land tumble down hillsides. So in general earth materials tend to move from high locations to low locations.

Which also sets the stage for a question that if gravity has been operating on earth materials for four and a half billion years, trying to move things from high places to low places, why aren't all the oceans filled up with sediments. See, there must be something else that lifts material back up to the surface. And that comes from the earth's internal heat.

Rocks are moved by convection currents in the interior of the earth. Convection currents are very similar to what happens to when you heat water on a stove top. The water's heated at the bottom and the warm water rises to the surface, cool water comes in to replace it, so it sets up a convection cell.

This convection cell operates. Why? Because its heated at the bottom but also because of gravity. The material, as it's heated, becomes less dense and so it rises to the top. You see, in the absence of gravity, there would be no convection. The warm water would simply stay at the bottom.

So, convection like this is very important in a number of earth systems. Air and water, for example, air and water vapor in the atmosphere are moved by the sun's heat in convection cells that we call weather. It's the interactions between this convective movement driven by heat and gravity that we call weather. And, of course, weather is responsible for environments such as deserts, or tropical rain forests which in turn influence the way in which the rocks interact with the environment.

Convection is also important in moving ocean water. Some of the ocean water, at least the surface, is moved by wind, but wind is caused by heat and convection, but the ocean currents themselves are driven by differences in density which come from difference is surface temperature of the water. Maybe more importantly for geological purposes the combination of heat and convection also causes lighter rocks to migrate from the center of the earth up to the surface in a process that we call differentiation.

And over the earth's history, for the last four and a half billion years or so it's undergone an overturn of material much in the same as if you mix oil and water together, over time the oil rises to the surface and forms a thin layer. We don't usually think of rocks as being able to move in this way, but as we will see in later programs, rocks in certain conditions can behave in a very fluid way like this.

We also see as we go through the program that this convection, combination of heat and gravity, within the interior of the earth is responsible for the causes and locations of both earthquakes and volcanoes, two of the most significant geologic features on the earth.

And in fact, this convection current causes mountain ranges like the Rockies or the Alps and the Appalachians and also even moves the continents. The continents, themselves, are rafted over the earth's surface by convection currents caused by heat within and the rising convection due to gravity.

That's about all I think I want to say about this sort of thing.

I do want to remind you of the assignment for Lesson 1 next time.

So, before you view the video for Lesson I, which is called, Down to Earth, you should read the text assignment.

And in this text assignment, be sure to include the Introduction, Summary, Terms to Remember, Questions to Review, and Questions for Thought in your reading. The Questions to Review and Questions for Thought are important because you should be able to answer them. And if you can't answer them, you might want to go back and look at the material until you come up with an answer. The Questions to Review, by the way, review the material that you've covered. The Questions for Thought ask you to take that material and assimilate it or to make new connections from it.

So, pay special attention to diagrams and photographs and study them until you recognize what they're trying to show. The assignment is chapter 1 in the text and lesson 1 in the study guide. The assignments for each program are also on the online broadcast schedule. In the text, study all of the photographs and diagrams Specifically note the photograph of Mt. Robson at the beginning of the chapter. Look at the photographs in the table of contents, and take a look and the physiographic map. This map shows you the various land forms of the United States and we will be referring to some of these locations as we go through the course. You don't have to memorize everything on the map, but just spend a few minutes looking at it and get a sense of where things like the Rocky Mountains and the Basin and Range Province and the Appalachians and the Interior Plains and all these things are and remember that this is here so that you can refer to it them in later programs.

Also make a special effort to review the box in chapter 1 on plate tectonics and the scientific method. In the first three or four programs we will be looking at the development of this global unifying theory called Plate Tectonics. This box sort of sets it up and I think it will help you to assimilate what I said earlier about how science works from models and so on.

YouÕll want to study the table at the end of the chapter to learn about some important ages in the development of life on Earth.And again, you don't need to memorize these, but we will be referring to these areas such as the Paleozoic or the or the Cenozoic or the Permian. In various programs you might want to remember that this table is there so that you can go back and refer to it if you need to.

So, that's it for this program. I'll see you next time!


Geology Is Everywhere!

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