Transcript title
Violent Earth
Credits
3
Grading mode
Standard letter grades
Total contact hours
30
Lecture hours
30
Course Description
Covers geoscience basics with a focus on historical geology and catastrophic events, including formation of the moon, volcanoes, earthquakes, megafloods, mass extinctions, asteroid impacts, and life itself. Intended for non-science majors.
Course learning outcomes
1. Identify common minerals, rocks, and fossils.
2. Describe the divisions of geologic time and historical events within.
3. Compare and contrast uniformitarian earth processes with catastrophic earth processes.
4. Describe the nine big ideas of earth science literacy.
Content outline
- Intro to geology: chemistry, minerals, rocks; geologic time and plate tectonics
- Continental rifting, continental collision, supercontinents
- Formation of universe/solar system, differentiation of Earth, Earth’s atmosphere
- Milankovitch cycles and glaciation
- Megafloods and asteroid impacts
- Melting and volcanic processes, volcanoes, supervolcanoes
- Flood basalt provinces
- Earthquakes, tsunami, and megaquakes
- Mass extinctions and fossils
- Catastrophes in review, the Anthropocene
Required materials
No materials required.
General education/Related instruction lists
