(the last revision, number 92, was on 02.11.06, but
I'll leave this page up for a bit longer as I see people are using it: in April
2007 I deleted many of the references to S269 but left some links to the
course-books as people may still be enjoying them - and even buying second-hand
copies. Caution - some of the material is out of date).
(S269
was an innovative second level 30 points science course: 2006 was the final year for this
course. There is a range of
other Earth Science courses. You can also see what
students and tutors say about
different OU courses, and there's even an on-line
learner's guide if you want
to study - but cannot decide what to study, or what to study next. S269 and S267 were
replaced in 2007 by a
single 30 points Earth Systems Science course, S279, Our
dynamic
planet.
FAQ 1. Is this - or was this ever - an official OU website?
Answer: No! I ran a hands-on web session for a couple of years
several years ago for my S269 students and this site grew out of that.
In fact nobody has asked me if this site is official (so FAQ 3
is not a FAQ! - or even an OAQ - Occasionally Asked Question) but people other than my
students in Devon and Cornwall used the site (and a couple of students have
put links from their sites), so it seems useful to say
that it's not official. Quite intentionally there is not an OU logo.
Obviously first has to be the Open University
but you can go straight to earth sciences, the virtual microscope or staff, or go direct to
the homepage of
Professor
Bob Spicer. Particularly relevant
to the last course text (ELE - Evolving Life and Earth) is the
CLAMP website.
Or go direct to the Open Library.
Much information is available to everyone, but for some you will need
passwords.
Mars figured prominently in S269.
Mars Express is in polar orbit,
and NASA has two rovers on the planet. The
Beagle 2, the lightweight lander which piggy-backed on Mars Express, should have
touched down on Christmas Day 2003. Did it get destroyed on entry? Is it stuck in a crater? Jammed between rocks?
Has it been found? You
can see some image analysis. As the available payload
on Mars Express was so minute Beagle 2
did not report any stages of its journey after separation,
thus we do not know what the problem was. The NASA landers reported at
each stage of their journey post separation (but each lander has a mass of about
half a tonne!). You can download images of the terrain from both Mars Express
and NASA: Mars Express is taking 3-D images, and has had its original mission
duration of one Martian year (687 Earth days) extended by one Martian year . Other sensors have identified water
molecules (before water was only assumed from evidence of erosion) - there's
even an ice lake in a crater near the north pole. And methane has been identified in the Martian atmosphere: methane would
not last long in the Martian atmosphere so it must be being generated now, but
how? Life? Geological processes (volcanoes)? Mars seems to
have recent activity - within the last 5 million years: it's not so dead! Glaciers are
thought to have flowed within the last 4 million years.
The importance of Beagle 2 was that it was going to look for the
chemical signature of life (i.e. the preferential use of the lighter isotope of
carbon) which NASA's rovers are not doing. If you want to know more about the
stable carbon isotopes, carbon 12 and carbon 13 - and what they can tell us -
study S279! [Carbon 14 is an unstable isotope with a half-life of 5,730 years, and is
used for dating geologically young materials ... from the last 40,000 years or
so].
New Scientist of
January 15, 2005 had a major feature about Mars ..... how has our understanding
changed since then? (The article would have been written in December 2004, and
probably tweaked in the first week of January).
There's an OU short course (i.e. 10 points, whereas S279 is 30 points) on
Mars too.
In 2004 NASA organised a
conference on terraforming Mars. Read an article by
Robin McKie (The Observer)
about this. You may find more recent material elsewhere - and even a report of
the conference.
Another change in our understanding came from the Rosetta mission which took
pictures of the impact of an object the size of a washing machine which NASA
fired at Comet Tempel 1, which seemed to be more of an 'icy dirtball' than the
conventional view of a comet as a 'dirty snowball'. Still, most of the
Earth's water was probably delivered by comets.
NASA
retrieved the material
collected from Comet Wild 2 (and some interplanetary dust) and you can sign up to
be a part of the research. There are over a million images of the aerogel
and, after training (over the web), successful volunteers were able to
download a virtual microscope and search the images for dust particles. I
believe they get to name any they find (well, that's the convention). The important science bit is that
comets are dust and ice - and have been ice (so far as we know) for the last 4.5
billion years - when the Solar System formed - so the dust particles have never
been heated and changed by cooking. You may still be able to find out more - and sign up - at the
Stardust@Home website. Some of the dust
grains arel being studied at the OU - at the PSSRI (Planetary & Space Science
Research Institute).
Some of the frst particles analysed had been
formed at high temperatures - which is unexpected. Relics from before
the formation of the solar nebula?- or blasted out from near the hot centre of
the nebula to the
outer reaches where comets are thought to have formed (now the Kuiper belt)?
There's a vast resource on-line at the Natural
History Museum. Particularly relevant is palaeontology, and
mineralogy (then go to meteorites for an article on
Martian meteorites, it's in OEL - Origins of Earth and Life - p
114-115). Or you can go to the Earthlab data site which is
searchable for UK minerals, rocks and fossils. Also ‘ask-a-scientist’.
Monica Grady (ex-OU, was at the Natural History Museum, now back at the OU as a
professor at PSSRI) gave the Christmas
2003 lectures
at the Royal Institution (televised on BBC2).
You don't need a meteorite impact to cause devastation. There was a Horizon
programme on July 20, 2006 about air explosions of extra-terrestrial objects - and a
BBC news item.
The Smithsonian Museum (National Museum of Natural History)
in Washington DC is another top museum with an excellent site.
Information on the Burgess Shale
(see ELE
- Evolving Life and the Earth), and
much more.
University of California Museum of Paleontology's
website
is a well-designed resource: you can burrow down from the surface layer which is
suitable for high school students. Useful for the greening of the land (chapter
4 in ELE
- Evolving Life and the Earth).
Another resource is
PaleoNet -
"designed as a resource for palaeontological professionals and graduate
students" but welcomes "all persons interested in the study of ancient life".
Geological Society of London ("The
Geolsoc") has an excellent collection of links (including geol surveys and geol
socs world wide) plus a geological news section (and old stories are
archived). An example is an update on the
Panspermia
idea. And (potential)
hydrogen-eating bacteria.
Also a report on the 3,000 year old
microbes at Lake
Vida, in the Antarctic, and its possible relevance to life on Mars. Water on Mars? -
not much carbonate suggests it's always been
cold and dry. There
are short notes about the debate about the reality of mantle plumes and LIPs -
both against
plumes and
for
plumes. And some teaching resources on Flood
basalts, mantle plumes and mass extinctions by Steve Self (now OU) et al. I
recommend the search facility on the Geolsoc site: you'll find several stories
about many topics from S269. In autumn
2003 there was an on-line debate about the Chicxulub impact - was it 300,000 years
before the KT event: I suggest watching the OU's video first then looking
at the debate. There's also a recent story about the
early separation within the mantle - within the first 30 million years of
Earth history, rather than a longer, slow process.
For news you can also use
New Scientist.
Nature operates a free weekly service
of delivering that week's titles (and links) to your mailbox (but you have to
pay to download papers ...... but go through the Open
Library for free if you see something you want).
Blackwell's, the
publishers, runs
Earth Pages. In the USA the
Geotimes has news. Another is ScienceDaily which has a story about
Archaean greenhouse (based on
methane) from Jim Kasting (see AEL - Atmosphere, Earth and Life)
(misleading first sentence in the introduction - not the actual press release -
implies oxygen is a greenhouse gas). And
there are earth science and environmental stories on the Sci-Tech
Sci-Tech News pages of
the BBC - for example some news about the
Snowball Earth hypothesis.
There's a pleasantly idiosyncratic (and witty)
news file run by an English geologist (Richard Cowen) now enjoying the
Californian climate at UC Davis.
Geologists’ Association ("The
GA") with links to local geological societies. The GA also runs 'Rockwatch'
for kids.
British Geological Survey …with a
photo-archive and links to geological surveys world-wide (some have good
material to download). Possibly the best part is the
seismology section. Also you can read Earthwise
on line, or get a hard copy free. BGS has a free downloadable
Geological Time Scale - in some detail!
BGS also has set up an 'Ask-a -geologist' service by email or phone.
Also worth exploring is NERC, the Natural
Environment Research Council. Particularly relevant is the
climate change
briefing - and its links. You can get the glossy Planet Earth
(formerly NERC News)
free*.
PPARC - the Particle Physics and Astronomy
Research Council - published Frontiers - until PPARC was merged
into a larger research council on April 1. The electronic Frontiers are probably still
available. If you
search for 'Pleiades' you can read a short article with a bearing on the 'faint
young Sun' hypothesis (OEL - Origins of Earth and Life - and AEL - Atmosphere,
Earth and Life). Frontiers number 17 had a lot on Mars -
not surprisingly with both NASA and ESA launches. Frontiers 25 was the
final issue. Frontiers 23 had a front cover photo of the ice lake on Mars (link to this
image above).
United States Geological Survey has much
educational material (mostly aimed at schools). [Scientific American and other bodies run
‘ask-a-scientist’ sites].
An amazing amount of stuff at NASA: images,
papers, educational material, .....geological maps of planets e.g.
Mars
and information about the rovers. 'Astrobiology' (also known as 'Exobiology') and other subjects are on
Origins - including the original archived press release on life in that
Martian meteorite. A bit of fun is a night-time
composite satellite image of Earth. You
can get news linked to images sent to you weekly from
Earth Observatory (EO): this is
really excellent bite-size science! For
example, there's an image related to El Nino. And an amazing image of the
2003 spring phytoplankton
bloom around New Zealand. And
atmospheric and stratospheric methane - and a link to new results from
Titan.
Visible
Earth is a source of stunning images (some of which are relevant to S269). Remember
the
North American black-out
in 2003?
The 2003
European heat-wave
(the image does not actually show an anomaly, just the difference from a
previous thermal image - which might itself have had anomalous values for some regions
... unusually for NASA, a very sloppy bit of writing)? There’s also the European Space Agency
(and info about Mars Express ... and another
email newsletter you can sign up for). EO is really something for
everybody - I've sent images to artists, and an image to friends about to walk
in the Atlas mountains.
The
PLATES site is pretty amazing - reconstructions, etc. Useful to have
PowerPoint, but there's plenty of useful stuff without it. (PowerPoint Viewer seems to be in most versions of MS Office). You can print
off a copy of an
Age of the Ocean Floor poster.
Oceanic images from NASA or NOAA
(National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration) or direct through
SeaWiFS. You can
browse SeaWiFS data.
There's a March 2006 global image posted. And make your own
SeaWiFS globe,
just for fun.
This should keep kids quiet for a few minutes (?nanoseconds) - and impress their
teachers! (SeaWiFS? That's Sea-viewing Wide Field of view Sensor). Look out
for images of blooms and red tides off Cornwall in the summer,
processed by the Remote Sensing Group of Plymouth Marine Lab; these
are usually
interpreted SeaWiFS imagery. Much more about blooms on the
Emiliania huxleyi homepage,
including stunning images [and there used to be a
link to a movie which showed oceanic currents and
eddies (AEL - Atmosphere,
Earth and Life in motion!) but I could not find it last time I looked - so
HELP, please, if you know where to find it].
Numerous sites for climate modelling and climate change (NASA lists
many - e.g. NOAA Paleoclimatology Program). e.g. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
(IPCC),
and IEA (this mostly for methods
of carbon dioxide capture and storage) or go via the
Met Office (or direct to the
Hadley
Centre). The field is so political, and with so much waffle on the
web, that it's best to use links from a reputable site rather than wading
through the results from a search engine.
Volcanoes worldwide can be accessed from a dedicated volcanoes site (quite a few
volcanoes have webcams - including Mt St Helens).
***
Other sites:
Cornish images at
CSM's virtual museum site with many images of specimens, geological
maps, guides to selected areas, etc.
West’s geological directory - field guides to download for your DIY fieldtrips. But much more. A
labour of love by Dr Ian West, a lecturer at Southampton University. There are
some free field guides for Cornwall on other pages in this Earthwords site (go to
Home, then look).
And if you want to pay (or belong to a library
which has paid) there are OUP's
(Oxford University Press) dictionaries at
www.oxfordreference.com.
OU staff and students can access this free through the
OU library. (I think Oxford's
Concise Dictionary of Earth Sciences is more useful than Berkeley's glossary -
but then I would, wouldn't I - as I contributed! Certainly the OUP has more
information about each term defined. )
Since S269 led us on to
the human impact on our planet you might wish to work out your ecological footprint
using EcoCal™ which is freely downloadable
by UK households from Best
Foot Forward. You may have already used EcoCal as part of one
of the OU's technology courses.
***
And if you've got this far - best wishes for any OU courses
you are taking!
Sowena
(cheers!) ..............(that's a Cornish flag - flag of
St Piran, patron saint of tinners. St Piran's Day is March 5th.
Parades, speeches in Cornish, eating of pasties, etc. Worldwide. The
Cornish diaspora was the result of the frequent downturns in hard-rock mining.
So you'll see Cornish names, and Cornish engine houses, in the USA, Mexico,
Spain, Australia, South Africa, ..... Some of the mining area here in Cornwall is now a
World Heritage site - usually called the Cornish
Mining Landscape - and this has links to all the places abroad where Cornish
mining influence went).
This should keep kids quiet for a few minutes (?nanoseconds) - and impress their
teachers! (SeaWiFS? That's Sea-viewing Wide Field of view Sensor). Look out
for images of blooms and red tides off Cornwall in the summer,
processed by the Remote Sensing Group of Plymouth Marine Lab; these
are usually
interpreted SeaWiFS imagery. Much more about blooms on the
Emiliania huxleyi homepage,
including stunning images [and there used to be a
link to a movie which showed oceanic currents and
eddies (AEL - Atmosphere,
Earth and Life in motion!) but I could not find it last time I looked - so
HELP, please, if you know where to find it].
Sowena
(cheers!) ..............(that's a Cornish flag - flag of
St Piran, patron saint of tinners. St Piran's Day is March 5th.
Parades, speeches in Cornish, eating of pasties, etc. Worldwide. The
Cornish diaspora was the result of the frequent downturns in hard-rock mining.
So you'll see Cornish names, and Cornish engine houses, in the USA, Mexico,
Spain, Australia, South Africa, ..... Some of the mining area here in Cornwall is now a
World Heritage site - usually called the 
