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 Wednesay, May 7, 2008, at 10:02 a.m. to add news about grades.

News

The Final Exam has been graded. Among raw scores, where 160 points were possible, the high was 152, the low was 75, and the average was 128.7. As percentages, those scores convert to a high of 95, a low of 46.9 and an average of 80.4.

Exercise 8 has been graded. The high grade was 97, and the low was 55, and the average was 75.3.

Corals and the Chikyu in the news:
BBC News article: Coral spawn turns Palau seas pink.
BBC News article: First contact to earthquake zone.

Exercise 7 has been graded and will be / was handed back at the end of class on Monday, April 21. The high was 100 (three of them), the low was 64, and the mean was 87.0.

Exam II has been graded and will be / was handed back at the end of class on Wednesday, April 16, 2008. The histogram below shows the distribution of grades.

Exercise 6 has been graded and was handed back on Wednesday, April 9, at the end of class. The high score was 100 (four of them, along with a 99 and three 98s), the low score was 56, and the mean was 87.6.
    With regard to scores on all six exercises, the highest average by one student on all six exercises is 99.3, the lowest average is 12.3 (by someone who has handed in only one exercise), and the average of these averages is 75.1 (a number that again requires the contextual information that sixteen students have failed to hand in at least one exercise). The average of averages for students who have handed in all six exercises is 83.9.

You can read about the plastic that washes up on Midway Island, in the middle of the Pacific, in a BBC News article. If you get interested, note the "see also" column of links to the right of the main article.

Upcoming talk of interest: Professor James Elsner of the Department of Geography of Florida State University on "Global warming, hurricanes, and insured losses: Anticipating the hurricane peril in the United States" in Room 200C GG on Friday, March 28th, 2008, at 3:30 pm.

Exercise 5 was handed back on Monday, March 24. The mean score was 85.4, the high was 98, and the low was 33.

Exercise 4 was handed back on Wednesday, March 5, 2008, at the end of class. The high score was 100 (five of them), the low score was 50, and the mean was 76.0.

Exam I has been graded and will be / was handed back on Wednesday, February 20, 2008, at the end of class. The distribution of scores is shown below, and they include eight points arbitrarily added to all scores.

Exercise 3 has been graded and will be / was handed back on Friday, February 15. The high score was 100, the low score was 75, and the mean was 88.7, largely thanks to an excessively generous grading scheme.

Exercise 2 has been graded and was handed back on Monday, February 11. After five points were added to each score, the high score was 100, the low score was 50, and the mean was 82.0.

Exercise 3 will be handed out on Wednesday, February 6, and will be due on Wednesday, February 13.

Exercise 2 was handed out on Wednesday, January 30, and will be due on Wednesday, February 6.

Exercise 1 has been graded and was handed back on Monday, February 4. The high score was 100, the low score was 52, and the mean was 81.1.

Thursday, January 24, 2008: Founders' Day Lecture at 3 p.m. in the University Chapel. Director of the Environmental Ethics Certificate Program Dorinda G. Dallmeyer will deliver a lecture entitled "Turning the Tide: Saving the Seas."

Thursday, January 31, 2008: A "Focus the Nation" series of lectures on environmental issues in Mahler Auditorium, the main auditorium in the Georgia Center.
8:15-9:15 am: The Future of the International Climate Change Regime: The Post-Bali Picture, Dan Bodansky, Law School
9:30-10:45 am: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Climate Change Panel, John Bergstrom, Agricultural and Applied Economics; Corrie Brown, College of Veterinary Medicine; Tom Lawrence, Department of Biological and Agricultural Engineering; Moderator: Ron Carroll, School of Ecology
11:00 am-12:15 pm: Georgia and Global Climate Change: Challenges and Solutions, Jim Porter, School of Ecology
2:00-3:15pm: Lessons from the Lost Glaciers: Out of the Clouds and Into Action, Janisse Ray, Author of Ecology of a Cracker Childhood
3:30-4:45 pm: (Charter Lecture) Changing Climate: Where Energy and Global Warming Meet, Dennis Dimick, Executive Editor, National Geographic Magazine

Class will meet as usual on Wednesday, January 9, 2008, and thereafter.

    As discussed on the syllabus, the final exam will consist of two parts. The first part will be analogous to Exams 1 and 2 in its format and will similarly cover material since Exam 2 (marine sediments, chemical oceanography, and paleoceanography). The only chapter of the textbook covered on this exam will be Chapter 5 on marine sediments.
     The second part of the final exam will be one randomly chosen essay question from among nine essay questions that cover the earlier parts of the course. Because students can prepare fully for the essay question, final exam grades are almost always higher than previous exam grades and thus provide an opportunity to bring up a grade that may otherwise be lower than desired.

Links to GEOL 3030 web pages:

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

An animation of the Coriolis Effect.

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.

Animations of the motions of the tides, a website prepared expressly for GEOL 3030.

A PDF file of the lecture overhead showing how residence times are calculated.
a PDF file of a timeline of ocean history
a PDF file of three detailed timelines

A diagram important in our lecture(s) on "Paleoceanography and the Future".

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.
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 Marine Sediments exercise (Exercise 7).

Suggestions for the Planet Xornam exercise (Exercise 8).

External links for the course:

(a list made in 1999 and thus now containing some dead links resulting from irresponsible management of the websites at which those dead links occur)

. . History of Oceanography
. . . . A year-by-year summary of the history of oceanography
         (and with some nice images too).
. . . . Herodotus's map of the world.
. . . . Ptolemy's map of the world.
. . . . A collection of medieval maps of the world.
. . . . A history of the British effort to accurately measure longitude for oceanic exploration.
. . . . The History of the Fram  and A biography of Fridtjof Nansen.
. . . . A Thorough History of the ALVIN.
. . . . A History of the JOIDES Resolution.
. . . . A world map showing locations of ODP cruises.
. . . . The new yet-to-be-deployed Chikyu drilling ship.
. . . . Links to prominent oceanographic institutions.

. . Marine Geology and Plate Tectonics
. . . . A good global image of the seafloor.
. . . . A recent (2000) global image of the seafloor viewable in detail.
. . . . Some detailed images of the Mid-Ocean Ridges
. . . . ODP, JOIDES, and The JOIDES Resolution
. . . . The US Geological Survey's Marine Geology page.
. . . . A map of the ages of the Atlantic sea floor.

. . Physical Oceanography
. . . . WHOI's Primer on Ocean Currents.
. . . . The Coriolis Force and kitchen sinks.
. . . . JPL's Topex/Poseidon recent global maps of wind speeds,.
. . . . . . . . wave heights, sea surface anomaly, and atmospheric water vapor.
. . . . NOAA's long-term maps of sea surface and air temperatures,
. . . . . . . . . wind speeds, sea surface air pressure, and humidity.
. . . . The University of Wisconsin's map of the latest (usually today's) sea-surface temperatures.
. . . . The Queensland Department of Natural Resources's
. . . . . . . . map of sea-surface temperature anomalies.
. . . . NOAA's El Nino Theme Page
. . . . JPL's month-by-month series of El Nino images
. . . . A NOAA/CIRES ENSO Index
. . . . A recent paper on the Pacific (inter-) Decadal Oscillation (PDO)
. . . . A graph of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO)
. . . . David B. Stephenson's North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) webpage
. . . . The North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) and more on the North Atlantic Oscillation
. . . . Tsunamis and The West Coast & Alaska Tusanimi Warning Center.
. . . . NOAA's Tide Predictions and other products
. . . . World-wide Tide Predictions and Records
. . . . The Severn River Tidal Bore,
. . . . . . . . more on The Severn River Tidal Bore,
. . . . . . . . and still more on The Severn River Tidal Bore (on the last page, Set 5 is the best)

. . Marine Ecology / Biological Oceanography
. . . . The National Science Foundation's Press Releases - see 24 January release about Archaea. (NEW!)
. . . . Cyanobacteria (blue-green algae).
. . . . Diatoms, diatoms, diatoms, and more diatoms.
. . . . Dinoflagellates and dinoflagellates and more dinoflagellates.
. . . . Coccolithophores.
. . . . An impressive picture of a red tide.
. . . . Fish.
. . . . Sharks and sharks.
. . . . Sea Turtles.
. . . . Whales and WhaleNet.
. . . . Predatory snails of the genus Conus: go to "video", where the leftmost of the three middle rows are probably the most striking.
. . . . Gray's Reef.
. . . . The Online Marine Picture Book of selected marine organisms.
. . . . Hydrothermal Vent communities and tube worms.
. . . . Pictures of (and text on) MOR-vent organisms.
. . . . Cold seeps off California.
. . . . Public aquaria.
. . . . Oceanlink's links listed by animal groups.
. . . . Plankton Net's marine biology links.
. . . . Yahoo's marine biology links.

. . Deep-Sea Sediments
. . . . Airborne transport of dust from Asia to the Pacific.
. . . . Airborne transport of dust from The Sahara to the Atlantic and Carribean.

. . Paleoceanography
. . . . Plate Tectonic Reconstructions.

. . Environmental Oceanography
. . . . Greenpeace.
. . . . Friends of the Earth.
. . . . Earth Island.
. . . . Coral Reef Alliance.
. . . . The Sea Turtle Restoration Project.
. . . . Coastal Development.
. . . . JAMSTEC's "Mighty Whale" project to recover wave energy for human use
         and their alternate Mighty Whale page.
. . . . UC-Irvine, Natural Resources Defense Council, Bajaquest, and Mitsubishi
         web pages about the impact of Mitsubishi's salt-extraction program
         in the Gulf of California on the grey whales that calve there.

Other Links:

Some lists of oceanographic web sites include
The World Wide Web Virtual Library for Oceanography in North America .
Oceanlink's list of marine science sites.
NOAA's list of Oceanography Resources on the Internet
NOAA's list of Marine Geology and Geophysics websites
ODP's list of oceanographic links.
PSU's Mike Arthur's list of oceanographic links (scroll down past the Geology links).
Scripps Institute of Oceanography's huge three-part list of links to oceanographic institutions and groups.

Texas A&M's Glossary of Oceanography.

Some fun, if not particularly focused, oceanographic web sites include
Some ocean images from the Space Shuttle Program
NOAA's International Year of the Oceans Page

To the GEOL 3030 course description page.
To Railsback's faculty page.
To The UGA Geology Department main page.
email to Bruce Railsback