Week After iTeach

After a 3-day visit from New Zealand friends, a big birthday celebration, and a publication deadline yesterday I am pleased to have time by the following Thursday to reflect on iTeach, and to review notes and prospects. That was one high-octane week in Fairbanks! I hope to keep hearing from the rest of the cohort.

Fads in Science

Checking with Chris Lott yesterday, I hoped to be reminded where I got the idea for spread-eagling the geological time scale for the last 4.8 million years (see previous blog). He suggested that it came from Bill Bryson’s 2003 book, “A Brief History of Nearly Everything.” Last night, and again this morning, I tore through that book, and failed to find the passage that we both suspected was somewhere in those 500 pages. No luck yet.

Nevertheless, poring through this one book reminded me of the fickleness or the faddishness of the bases for what we think we know about the way our planet has developed. Two examples:

1. After Hutton, Lyell and Darwin, gradualism (“uniformitarianism”) so thoroughly dominated natural philosophy that the previously dominant paradigm (“catastrophism”) was driven out of vogue. Noah’s Flood of the Bible was the bathwater. Several babies went out with the bathwater. In the early 20^th century, geologists were reluctant to accept evidence for catastrophic flooding in NW U.S. states, associated with repeated outbreaks of Lake Missoula. And in the late 20^th century (~1980) paleontologists resisted accepting evidence for the destructive impact of a comet or asteroid near the Yucatan Peninsula and extinction of 70 percent of living species, including dinosaurs. Finally, the pendulum has swung to admit that catastrophes do explain some of Earth’s evolution.
2. Upon the voyage of HMS Challenger in the 1870s, oceanography was indelibly stamped with the identity of being ship-borne. Exclusively. So discredited were the earlier practices of naturalists’ noting what washed up on the beach that publishing any but shipboard observations went completely out of favor. People failed over and over to notice that shallow-water marine organisms were often overlooked by oceanographers. Over 50 years passed, during which nobody officially “noticed” (published) the fact that the blue mussel really does live widely along Arctic shores. Finally, beachcombing has returned to favor.

Deep Time

All this week, I’ve helped carry the flats of garden plants: out onto the deck in the morning, and back into the living room in the evening. This is the process called “hardening off” that we use to prepare plants for independent productivity. The learning we’ve been exposed to in iTeach feels somewhat like a hardening-off process. Will I take root and become productive in a distance-delivery mode with suitable digital-age skills to keep up with students?

On Thursday, we were exposed to questions of copyright, intellectual property, and hints of turmoil over this broad area of where ideas come from. This topic both fascinates and perplexes me.

I wanted to share with colleagues a difficult conceptual problem at the end of this iTeach experience: the depth of geologic time. How long has planet Earth been around? In a word, about 5 billion (with a b) years. In another term, about one-third as long as the universe has existed since the Big Bang, some 15 billion years ago.

Lots of attempts have been made to display the development of the Earth over time in a rational and memorable way. Students have a terribly hard time, judged by “evidence” and “assessments” grown out of “activities.” The last two times I have explored deep time, I’ve use the images below.

The point of this suite of images is the extraordinary length of time that it has taken for Earth to evolve to having a mantle of ocean, atmosphere and terrestrial systems teeming with multicellular life. Concurrently, students are meant to sense how recent or shallow our human footprint has been on the surface of this tapestry. In effect, one or two swipes of a fingernail file over your outstretched middle finger on the right hand remove the equivalent of 10 thousand years of written human history from this suite of images.

I’m at the point of converting these raw materials from what became a classroom Powerpoint image suite to something more appropriate to distance teaching. Everybody’s suggestions are most welcome.

Learning Activities, Effective and "Flop"

One of the most engaging periods of learning for Beringia students was a visit to Georgeson Botanical Garden. They were asked to relate the success of experimental plantings of exotic shrubs and trees from different parts of the world. They were fascinated (working in small groups) to find that Siberian shrubs and trees grew very well, compared to other high latitude sources.

My hopes to expose North Slope students to the rich structure of tundra plants and animals went nowhere. A brick of vegetative mat uprooted in winter proved to have a very active population of red mites. When they thawed out, and when students looked at them through dissecting microscopes, the laboratory evacuated with alacrity that would have drawn praise from the Fire Marshall.

Course Information

Welcome to "Discovering Beringia," an undergraduate course undergoing development and diversification. Here follows the basic syllabus or outline for the course. As a web-based course, its "platform" may be Blackboard, Moogle, or other structure. This blog will advise you of its disposition.

Course Syllabus

GEOS F 392 (Cross-listed: BIOL F 392, RD F 392)[1]

“Discovering Beringia” 3 credits (3 + 0)

Instructor of Record: David W. Norton, 218C O’Neill, 11:00 am to 1:00 pm MWRF. 907.474.7746; ffdwn@uaf.edu {NOTE: There will be guest instructors frequently during this course}

Textbooks:

O’Neill, D. 2004. The Last Giant of Beringia: The mystery of the Bering Land Bridge. Boulder CO: Westview Press vii + 231 pp.

Ruddiman, W. F. 2001. Earth’s Climate: Past and future. New York NY: Freeman xxii + 465 pp.

Hopkins, D.M., J.V. Matthews, Jr., C.E. Schweger, and S.B Young (eds.) 1982. Paleoecology of Beringia. New York NY: Academic Press xiv + 489 pp.

Flannery, T. 2001. The Eternal Frontier: An ecological history of North America and its peoples. New York NY: Grove, 404 pp.

Marshak, S. 2005. Earth: portrait of a planet. 2^nd Ed. New York NY: W.W. Norton. 748 pp.

Supplementary readings from peer-reviewed literature will be assigned and made available through ERes, or on a course-specific web page

COURSE DESCRIPTION

Origin and successive refinements to the scientific (geologic, biogeographic, climatological and archaeological) evidence for episodic terrestrial connections between Asia and North America since the Mesozoic. Reconstructions of ecosystems in the subcontinent of Beringia. Significance of Beringia to high-profile scientific topics and issues, such as global climate change, peopling of the Americas, and species extinctions. PREREQUISITES: One of the following---GEOS 100X, GEOS 101X , BIOL 105-106X, BIOL 102, BIOL 104X, or permission of Instructor

COURSE GOALS

A. General

1. Acquaint students with the historical developments by which broad scientific consensus on the previous existence(s) of land bridges vs. marine transections of these bridges has been achieved and extended;

2. Develop a trans-disciplinary forum for discussion of the persuasiveness of ecological, paleontological, geologic, and other discipline-specific evidence;

3. Familiarity with several methods and styles of undergraduate instruction and discourse;

4. Experience connections between cutting-edge scientific investigations and instructional curricula in the sciences.

B. Student Learning Outcomes:

1. Mastery of this regional (Western Arctic) interdisciplinary theme, which is fundamental to the development of high-latitude earth and biological sciences, and to human geography;
2. Practice the observational and communications skills that scientists have applied in the late 20^th and early 21^st centuries to the building of this unifying theme;
3. Grasp the manner in which geological, paleontological, biological and other scientific disciplines marshal evidence when contributing to a unifying theme in sciences;
4. Become conversant with the cutting edge of Beringia theory and the bases for hypothesizing a land bridge connecting Asia and western North America, particularly from late Mesozoic and early Tertiary geologic, floral and faunal events and patterns;
5. Develop the capability to evaluate the reliability of proxy data used in paleoclimate reconstructions.

Instructional Methods: Various modes, including lectures, audioconferencing, ERes, field trips.

Course Calendar:[2]

Week One: “Greenhouse Earth” 100 million years ago; Continents, seas & sea level, tectonism; Tectonic scale climate changes; seasonality, plants and animals; Geologic Time Scale.

Week Two: Biogeographic patterns by the end of the Mesozoic; K-T catastrophe and mass extinctions; Transition from “Greenhouse Earth” to “Icehouse Earth” throughout the Tertiary, and suggested mechanisms for this transition.

Week Three: The Beringian Paradoxes of the Quaternary; Paleogeography; Key Earth Processes; High Latitude Seasonality; Water and carbon cycles; Orbital scale climate changes.

Week Four: Early notions of Asia’s and Alaska’s floral and faunal similarities; Personalities in Beringia studies; Beringia in the Pleistocene; Evidence from Glacial and Periglacial Environments.

Week Five: A Review of Radiocarbon and other Dating methods; Grouping, segmenting and naming intervals in the flow of time; Review of Proxy Data and hypothesised mechanisms.

Week Six: Beringia’s communities and ecosystems reconstructed; Beringia’s significance in “peopling of the Americas” debates; Late Pleistocene changes in Beringia; Significance of Beringia research to projected climate changes.

Course Policies:

Participation in class discourse, hence attendance, is especially important. As the course develops, students may elect to replace one or more exams with written or oral presentation to class exploring a topic related to Beringia and the Bering Land Bridge. Such topics would be mutually agreed upon with the Instructor.

Evaluation:

Class participation 50 %; Papers and periodic exams 30 %; Assisting students who have little formal science background with course material 15% Evidence of original thinking 5 %.

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[1] UAF -92 suffix designates a special topics course, in which instructional material is on trial before a course is formally adopted into the UAF Course Catalog.

[2] This Syllabus was based on a 6-week Summer Sessions schedule in which classes meet 4 days weekly for 3 h each day. North American Semester courses are based on 14 weeks of instruction, 3 hours per week

Another Fun Exam Question

Consider the interpretive map of North America here:
This geological interpretation is meant to represent the end of the Cretaceous, about 65 million years ago. Is the representation of Bering Strait and Beringia accurate? Why or why not?

Fun Exam Question

(Beringia)
Pick one geographic feature of Earth from the following list:

Drake Passage
Tibetan Plateau
Himalayan massif
Great Rift Valley
Straits of Bosporus
Missoula Lakes/ Channeled Scablands
Gates of Gibraltar
Isthmus of Panama

Now, compare and contrast Beringia's influence with your chosen feature's influence on climate, biogeography, how long the feature has influenced these parameters, and rate the feature accordingly as either more or less significant (far-reaching) than that of Beringia.