Week+17

This week your assignment is to read Chapter 13: Introduction to Landform Study and Chapter 14: The Internal Processes. You will find the supplemental material posted here: http://schmidtphysicalgeography.wikispaces.com/Ch+13 and here: http://schmidtphysicalgeography.wikispaces.com/Ch+14

You have quizzes on Blackboard for each chapter and you have one posting assignment which is located here: http://schmidtphysicalgeography.wikispaces.com/Week+17 at the bottom of the page.

These are your last two chapters, next week I will open your final exam. The last official day of your class is May 26, 2016. Please get your presentations posted by that date. I know how things get at the end of the semester, so I will leave these quizzes open until that final day. Let me know if you are having any trouble posting your presentations.

There is a Prezi for chapter 13, and there is also a lot of supplemental material on the chapter page. I think I have actually embedded it all into the Prezi for this chapter - except for the last articles on the bottom of the page which are more recent.

On the chapter 13 page, most of the supplemental material is in the Prezi – it’s one of my better Prezi’s : ) But if you go to the bottom of the page, I have not been able to keep up, there are some new articles on the page – maybe some of you have heard of Boron, CA – it’s not far from here, there is an article about the borax works. I also have some pictures of Alberta’s Tar Sands, which is sedimentary rock – where we get fossil fuel from, I know some of you will be interested in seeing where much of our gasoline comes from. Also you may have seen the massive fire in Canada on the news, it is right near the tar sands. The last thing on the page in a nice tectonic model that I think some of you may also like. I think this is a fun chapter and I hope that you enjoy it too.

Unfortunately I do not have a Prezi for chapter 14. There are two PowerPoints posted on the page, the top one is the newer one, the most recent from the publisher - which I have not edited at all. The second one is my very old one, that I did edit, and I know that it has too much information in it to present in class, but you may find that one most helpful. I feel like the newer one is missing some important things, but I have just not had time to turn this one into a nice Prezi.

I have a lot of supplemental material on this page! It is one of my favorite lectures to do in class - save the best for last :) It is because we live in such an earthquake prone area and students always have lots of questions. Since I have lived here most of my life, a lot of them are questions I have had too. I find plate tectonics and volcanoes fascinating.

The first thing you will see past the PPTs is a link to USGS Earthquake Map in real time

[] I hope that you will all have a look at this. This is a public GIS (going back to chapter 2), so it is a map that works in layers. You can adjust the layers on the map by clicking the little gear wheel in the top right area. I like to ask it for 7 days all magnitudes to show in class, and I select the faults layer and the street map. One of my favorite things to do is zoom in on the campus so I can show students how the campus is built right on the San Jacinto fault. You can see that there are dozens of small quakes along this fault - it moves all the time and we rarely notice it. The small earthquakes are actually good, it means that things are moving like they are supposed to. When we do not have quakes, they call it earthquake silence and it's bad because it means something is stuck and pressure is building, which will eventually result in a larger quake.

If you take a look at the state of California with the fault layer on, you will see one thick red line running from Mexico up through California past San Francisco - this is the San Andreas fault. They break San Andreas into three sections - north, central, and southern. Looking at the real time earthquake map, you will notice that you see small quakes all along the northern and southern sections, but none in the middle - which is out section. This is why they say we are waiting for the big one, because there hasn't been a big quake on the middle section since 1857, so pressure has been building since then. There are some people who theorize that the middle segment of San Andreas is not active any more and instead the San Jacinto fault is the main active line now. I am not sure if that is true or not, but looking at the real time map, you will see lots of activity on San Jacinto, but not on San Andreas mid section. I wouldn't get complacent though, there are MANY active faults all around us. One runs through the mobile home park I live in - the Etiwanda-Red Hill Fault. The first article you will find on the page is about our prototype early warning system, we can predict quakes, but only by a few seconds. This is not getting the funding it needs, if we actually funded this, we could probably get much better. There is an app for your phones that is connected to the early warning system, I have it linked a little father down the page. The second article I have on the page is about the Puente Hills Fault and how it runs right under Los Angeles. This fault was not even discovered until 1987 when it caused the Whittier Narrows quake. This is why I say do not become complacent, nine people were killed in that quake and it destroyed many homes in Whittier and it wasn't even a 6.

Going down the page, you will find a little article about liquefaction - one of your vocabulary words, and a hazard we have here, especially in San Bernardino and Rancho Cucamonga because of what kind of terrain they are built on. Below that is the hazard map for the world, so you can see we have a problem here. There is another little article about lava and then one about the plumes of smoke that come out of volcanoes. Below that, you will find the Paricutin volcano, which started in a corn field in Mexico like a little ant hill, but is now a 1,000 foot high volcano - a great story! I have a little demonstration photo of how you can play with oreo cookies and make them like plate boundaries, I think it's fun : ) Then I have several volcano maps. Often people are unaware that we have volcanoes in California, we actually have many, so I always show the maps in class. Oregon and Washington have them too, as do Hawaii and Alaska. We have 10% of the world's volcanoes in the US.

I have an article about the west coast of North America and South America, we are a mess compared to South America. Below that is an article about San Andrea with pictures of road cuts showing how the rocks have been bent and folded because of Plate Tectonic, this picture is off the 5 freeway, but you do not have to go there to see it, we have the same thing here along the 15 near the 138. After that is the article about obsidian that I mentioned last week, then after that is an article about Vasquez Rocks. Mormon Rocks and Vasquez Rocks are related, created because of San Andreas fault. After that is a small article about The Creeping Imperial Fault with a picture of broken cement on a canal. I like to talk about this one because San Bernardino is always moving like this too and you can see the offset in sidewalks and fences and other things that we build across the faults. After you are done with this chapter, you will probably look at cracks in the cement differently. One semester a student did his presentation on earthquakes and he rode his bike all over his neighborhood in San Bernardino and took picture of where he saw offsets, it was a great presentation and I didn't even realize that there was so much right here. It was before I started having students post their presentations and I really regret not getting a copy of that one because I would have loved to share it with future classes, but you will all be wise to this after the chapter, and I guess you can go find the offsets yourselves if you want to.

The next thing you will find on the page is an article about the major earthquakes of Southern California from 1769 to the present -

[] I HIGHLY recommend that you all have a look at this article. I say this because we tend to forget about these disasters. Many people are unaware of the Whittier Narrows quake of 1987, Whittier looks all nice and new today because it was rebuilt after the quake and people forget. I do not post things like this to scare you, though I must admit to being a little frightened after reading it myself. I share them with you and talk about them in class because forewarned it forearmed. There is nothing we can do to prevent an earthquake. They will happen and we cannot control them, but we can prepare. Having a kit and a plan is so important for us with this hazard we live with.

Next on the page is a little article about Kilauea with a great picture that some call the gateway to hell. After that is an article about Bell Mountain, which is a landform that we see from the Victor Valley College campus, maybe some of you have seen it? After that is an article about collective memory and the 2011 tsunami in Japan. This will help you understand why it is important not to forget about the quakes of the past. Below that is the link to the early warning app, which you may want to try out. After that there is an article about the Giant's Causeway, which is in Ireland, but it's the same thing as Devils Postpiles here in California. Then there is a plate map video and the last article is about one of Ecuador's volcanoes.

I hope you enjoy this chapter, it's one of my favorite classes to teach.

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