STEM Education Institute Tuesday Seminar
Mark Leckie of the UMass Amherst Geosciences Department will be giving a lecture titled "Using Paleomagnetism to Tell the Age of Deep-Sea Sediments: Lessons from the School of Rock."
The initial School of Rock was a sea-going, hands-on discovery expedition that connected scientists and educators with one of the largest, yet largely untapped, geoscience databases available. The expedition was sponsored by the Joint Oceanographic Institutions (JOI) in alliance with Texas A&M University and Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University, who jointly operate and staff the research drilling vessel JOIDES Resolution. Since the maiden voyage of School of Rock in 2005, a number of 1-day, 3-day, and 7-day land-based teacher workshops have engaged educators in the use of authentic scientific ocean drilling data for teaching across the STEM disciplines. All the activities developed by the college-university instructors and participating Earth science teachers are available online at oceanleadership.org/materials/activities.
My School of Rock colleagues and I have developed two inquiry-based modules specifically designed for Earth science teachers and undergraduate geoscience classes that incrementally demonstrate how age can be established for marine sediment records using authentic scientific ocean drilling data. The two modules utilize microfossils (ancient plankton with hard parts) contained within deep-sea sediments (biostratigraphy), and the paleomagnetic record preserved in sediments (magnetostratigraphy). Other tangible topics investigated in these modules include ecology, evolution, and biogeography, as well as seafloor spreading and the development of the Geomagnetic Polarity Timescale. Both units complement companion modules built by our team on the nature and distribution of marine sediments and stable isotopes as tools in paleoclimate research based on deep-sea records. All modules are designed so students explore the process of science by making observations and interpretations, plotting and analyzing data, posing hypotheses and investigating ways to test their hypotheses. The modules can be used as a series of short exercises in both small and large lecture settings, or they can be used as a comprehensive package for laboratory sections. Instructors can use parts of a module in class and assign other parts as homework assignments. While the biostratigraphy and magnetostratigraphy modules provide valuable lessons on how scientists establish the age control for our proxy records of global change, they also provide broader connections to the process of science and discovery, both past and present.