Lab 5: Ocean Drilling Program - From Mountains to Monsoons.
Purpose
- Examine how sedimentological data can be used to test a plate tectonic/climatological
hypothesis.
- Introduce marine sediments, including where they come from, and how they
are analyzed.
- Acquaint students with the way a large scientific expedition is planned
and conducted.
- Acquaint students with the Ocean Drilling Program.
- Provide a realistic example of how different lines of evidence, and
results from different scientific subdisciplines, are combined to reach
a conclusion or test a hypothesis.
- Provide an interesting and intricate example of the interconnectedness
of solid earth and climatic processes.
- Introduce the terminology and techniques of systems dynamics as a way
to organize one's thinking about complex and interconnected systems.
Target Concepts
| energy |
sources and sinks |
observation vs. interpretation |
| heat |
rates |
heat capacity |
| temperature |
buoyancy |
superposition |
| feedback |
density |
erosion/deposition |
| flux |
convection |
nutrient |
Target Skills
Information:
- Find the desired geoscience information using electronic sources such
as the World Wide Web.
Logic and Reasoning:
- assemble a logical chain of reasoning from cause to proximal effect
to distal effect.
- assemble a logical chain of reasoning from observation to inference.
Data Manipulation and Analysis:
- plot one variable against another, and describe patterns and trends.
- use the concepts of positively or negatively correlated in the description
and interpretation of data sets.
- plot a variable versus time and describe the patterns and trends observed.
- Use the concepts of peak, trough, and rate of change in the description
and interpretation of temporal data.
Earth Materials:
- predict (qualitatively) how a fluid will move under a variety of circumstances.
Systems Thinking:
- use the concepts of negative and positive feedback in describing Earth
systems.
- given a description of an Earth system, break it down conceptually
into a network of sources, sinks, and reservoirs.
- draw a flowchart showing fluxes within a system of sources, sinks,
and reservoirs.
- describe Earth processes in terms of fundamental physical phenomena
(mass, heat, gravity, buoyancy, density, etc.)
- recognize a model (i.e. given a description of an Earth process, pull
out a thread of reasoning that constitutes a model, as distinguished
from observation, predictions).
Communication:
- be able to write a lucid description of a geoscientific observation,
process or chain of reasoning using appropriate professional vocabulary.
Outline
- Look around the Web site of the Ocean Drilling Program, and familiarize yourself
with what resources and opportunities are available from ODP. Find answers
to the following questions:
- Where is the ODP drillship Joides Resolution working at this moment?
- What is the main objective of the current drilling leg?
- Work through the Ocean Drilling Program's "From Mountains to Monsoons" multimedia
CDROM.
- If you want to review or skip around, hold down the control key and
press M. This will bring you to a menu or table of contents for the
entire program. Control-M sometimes takes several tries, and it doesn't
work at all when the audio is playing.
- Use the STELLA systems dynamics modeling software to build a qualitative
model of a few of the interconnecting fluxes and reservoirs explored in
the ODP "Mountains to Monsoons" CD-ROM. Your model should describe fluxes
in and out of the following stocks:
- volume of rock in the Himalayas,
- volume of sediment in the Bengal Fan.
Are there any feedback loops in your model? Are they reinforcing or
counteracting feedbacks? Think about the physical meaning of the feedback
loops, how they work in the real world.
- STELLA can also be used to build a qualitative model for the monsoon
system, as explained in the CD-ROM "ODP: From Mountains to Monsoons." The
following STELLA diagrams show the working of the normal monsoon system.
- View diagram of spring/summer monsoon.
- View diagram of fall/winter monsoon.
How could this model be modified to show the additional forcing introduced
by the uplift of the Himalayas?
- Write answers to the questions pursued on the ODP Web Site.
- Write an Initial Reports chapter for the work you completed
with the Mountains to Monsoons CD-ROM (example
of an ODP Initial Reports volume). Usually the ODP Initial Reports
have one chapter for each site, but occasionally several closely related
sites are combined in the same chapter, and that's what you will be doing
here. The format of an Initial Reports chapter would include:
- Objectives: a brief statement of the major goal of the site or sites.
- Regional Setting: the tectonic/geological/sedimentary setting of
the site(s), and why that(those) particular location(s) were chosen.
- Sedimentology: Methods and observations of the sedimentologists.
- Paleontology: Methods and observations of the micropaleontologists.
- Paleomagnetics: Methods and observations of the paleontologists.
- (Other specialists reports, such as geochemistry. You won't need
these.)
- Interpretation: written by the Co-Chief Scientists, this section
brings together all of the observations from the various shipboard
specialists to answer major questions.
- Provide a printout of the qualitative STELLA model you developed in part
3 of the lab. Discuss any feedback loops in your model.
- Provide a sketch or STELLA printout to show your ideas from part 4 of
the lab outline. Describe in words how your addition to the monsoon model
works.
Updated
October 18, 2004
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