GEOL 3030 meets the UGA environmental literacy requirement.  See our GEOL 3030 course description page for a description of the course, its requirements, its scope, its target population, etc..   That page is intended for students interested in taking the course.

This page provides day-to-day course information as needed and links to WWW sites useful to the course.

This page was last updated on April 25, 2012, to add links to suggested readings and illustrations.

GEOL 3030 course evaluations can be submitted between April 20 and April 30.

Exercise 5 has been graded and will be or was handed back on Wednesday, April 4.  Of the 42 submissions from 47 enrolled students, the high score was 100 (three of them!), the low score was 75, and the mean was 91.4.

Exercise 4 has been graded and handed back.  Of the 40 submissions from 47 enrolled students, the high score was 98 (two of them), the low score was 70, and the mean was 89.9.

Exam I has been graded and will be or was handed back on Monday, February 20. The distribution of grades is shown below.

Exercise 3 has been graded and will be or was handed back on Wednesday, February 15.  Of the 41 submissions from 47 enrolled students, the high score was 97 (with three 96s in hot pursuit), the low score was 57, and the mean was 83.9.

Exercise 2 has been graded and will be or was handed back on Wednesday, February 15.  Of the 44 submissions from 47 enrolled students, the high score was 99 (and a 98 just behind), the low score was 65, and the mean was 86.4.

Exercise 1 (previously mistakenly identified here as Exercise 2) has been graded and was handed back on Friday, February 3.  Of the 44 submissions from 47 enrolled students, the high score was 99 (three of them), the low score was 41, and the mean was 89.2.

The syllabus is now available as a pdf.

The textbook was available at the UGA Bookstore, and presumably at off-campus outlets, as of January 3, 2012.  Students should be warned that the course focuses more on lectures than on the textbook, and some students may want to share and jointly use one copy of textbook.  The textbook is the tenth edition of H.V. Thurman and A.P. Trujillo's Introductory Oceanography.

Some previous plots and histograms of grades from previous years remain below, solely to illustrate past trends.

There is a recent article in Science (21 January 2011: Vol. 331, no. 6015, pp. 274-276) on killer whales (Orcas) discussing their newly-discovered predation on large whales and the extent to which there are three modes/cultures of killer-whale behavior.  To access the paper, use the UGA Libraries' on-line access to journals.

The histograms showing the distribution of grades for the last two year's Exams I and II are included below solely as an illustration of past performance.

Answers to questions recently or frequently asked about GEOL 3030.
Essay questions for the GEOL 3030 final exam.

Supplememtary reading about ocean circulation. The first four pages (pp. 47-50) are the main reason for providing this reading for those students wanting a broader and more modern view of ocean circulation. The "WOCE" to which the author refers is the World Ocean Circulation Experiment, a huge data-collection effort in the 1990s that was the subject of the entire book from which the reading is taken.

The eWOCE Gallery at which you can view many profiles of temperature, salinity, O₂, PO₄, SiO₂, and NO₃ through the oceans. These summarize data collected by WOCE, the World Ocean Circulation Experiment, and are the most up-to-date picture of ocean circulation.

GEOL 3030 exams from Spring 2011:
Exam I
Exam II
Exam III (the final exam)

GEOL 3030 course evaluations

GEOL 3030 exercise material:

An explanation of bathymetric maps for Exercise 1.
An explanation of bathymetric profiles for Exercise 1.

The map of seafloor ages for Exercise 2.
Supplementary instructions about measuring spreading rate for the Plate Tectonics exercise (Exercise 2).
Supplementary instructions for contouring the bathymetric map for the Plate Tectonics exercise (Exercise 2).
An explanation of bathymetric maps, made for Exercise 1 but still useful for Exercise 2 as well.

Everything that you need for Exercise 3 on Ocean Circulation should be in your lecture notes.

First considerations for getting started on the Tsunami Travel Time exercise (Exercise 4).
More thoughts on the heart of the Tsunami Travel Time exercise.
Possible use of a spreadsheet for the Tsunami Travel Time exercise.
An Excel spreadsheet for people who have never used a spreadsheet.
A suggestion in thinking about whether the tsunami will cause the sea to first advance, or first retreat, at a given destination..

Help finding locations on the map for the Georgia Tides exercise (Exercise 5).
Suggestions regarding the questions for the Georgia Tides exercise.

Supplementary instructions about plotting data in the Marine Biology exercise (Exercise 6).
A suggestion for Question 2 of Part 1 of the Marine Biology exercise.

Suggestions for the Planet Xornam exercise (Exercise 7).

Suggestions for the Marine Sediments exercise (Exercise 8).

Web-based Readings (in addition to readings in the textbook indicated on the syllabus)

Optional readings on minerals and rocks: (These illustrations accompanied the first day's lecture on
basic geology. That lecture will not be covered on Exam 1.)
Generalized trends in silicate minerals in igneous rocks
Rocks, Part I
The origin of sedimentary rocks
The origin of siliciclastic and biochemical sedimentary rocks

Suggested readings on marine geology:

Plate tectonic boundaries
Plate tectonics and sinking cooled oceanic lithosphere
      (now included in the illustration of boundaries above)
Subduction and rollback
Rollback and mantle flow
Mid-ocean ridges and their hydrothermal systems, Part I
Mid-ocean ridges and their hydrothermal systems, Part 2
The traditional hot-spot / mantle-plume model
      the last three of which are part of the Dynamic Plate Tectonics website

Assigned readings on physical oceanography:

Density of seawater at the sea surface
Variation of atmospheric pressure between and within climatic belts
The Trade Winds and Westerlies wind belts
The Ekman spiral, dynamic topography, and coastal and equatorial upwelling
Shallow-water waves and deep-water waves

Suggested readings on physical oceanography:

An animation of the Coriolis Effect.
A table showing the conceptual linkage of atmospheric circulation, ocean circulation, and plate tectonics.
The interaction of ocean currents, tides, and waves.
An explanation of the interaction of ocean currents, tides, and waves.
Animations of the motions of the tides, a website prepared expressly for GEOL 3030.
The spring-neap monthly tidal cycle.
A map of the tides of Earth's oceans.
A modified map of the tides of Earth's oceans.

Assigned readings on biological oceanography:

Cycling of nitrogen as a nutrient
Cycling of phosphorous as a nutrient
Cycling of silicon as a nutrient
Cycling of iron as a nutrient
Iron as a limiting nutrient in the ocean
Mid-ocean ridges and their hydrothermal systems, Part 2
Annual ecological cycles - Part 1
Annual ecological cycles - Part 2

Suggested readings on biological oceanography:

A table on marine mammals

Assigned readings on chemical oceanography:

The twenty-four most abundant solutes in seawater
Variation in concentration of solutes in the oceans I: Nutrients (nitrate, phosphate, silica)
Variation in concentration of solutes in the oceans Ia: Nutrients and biological productivity
Variation in concentration of solutes in the oceans II: Dissolved oxygen (O₂)
Variation in concentration of solutes in the oceans III: Carbon dioxide (CO₂)
Variation in concentration of solutes in the oceans IIIa: Carbon dioxide and the carbonate compensation depth (CCD)
Variation in concentration of solutes in the oceans IV: Oxidation of sinking organic particles - a summary
Variation in concentration of solutes in the oceans V: Scavenged ions
Variation in concentration of solutes in the oceans VI: The conservative solutes

A PDF file of the lecture overhead showing how residence times are calculated.
Concentrations and residence times of solutes in seawater

The four-box model of the oceans presented in lecture
The seven-box model of the oceans presented in lecture

Assigned readings on paleoceanography:

a PDF file of a timeline of ocean history - not a reading from which exam questions will be drawn.
Possible causes of sea-level change
The path from deep-sea sediments to paleoclimate records
Oxygen Isotopes - not a reading from which exam questions will be drawn,
        but a reading that will make more sense of the next item.
Oxygen isotope records of Cenozoic global cooling and glaciation
The Warm Saline Deep Water hypothesis
a PDF file of three detailed timelines
a Phanerozoic paleoenvironmental timeline
A diagram important in our lecture(s) on "Paleoceanography and the Future".

Suggested readings on paleoceanography:

Milankovitch cycles I: eccentricity
Milankovitch cycles II: tilt
Milankovitch cycles III: precession

Assigned readings for the "Three Weird Seas" lecture:

What's an ocean, and how many does Earth have?
Size and salinity of lakes, and the ocean(s) I
Size and salinity of lakes, and the ocean(s) II
The Black Sea I: Geography
The Black Sea II: A schematic cross-section
The Black Sea IIIa: Variation with depth
The Black Sea IIIb: Chemical variation with depth