Essential Question: How do stories of cataclysmic events help inform students about geosciences and cultures?
ENGAGE
In the last module, we explored the geologically slow-motion effects of mountain building and erosion forces that created and modified our present landscapes.
In this module we will build on what we've learned exploring tectonic processes and how these geologic forces often lead to dramatic changes at the Earth's surface--and dramatic changes to people impacted by these events. Volcano, earthquake or tsunami, all issue from one common force--the force of Earth's internal heat expressed at the surface.
In Module II, we also considered some of the relationships that cultures share with the landscapes they inhabit. Such relationships develop gradually over time in landscapes that also change gradually--sometimes imperceptibly in a human lifetime.
But sometimes landscapes can change in an instant, usually unexpectedly. Volcanic eruptions, earthquakes and tsunamis are sudden and often catastrophic events that change landscapes and the lives of those living there.
If you're between 1 and 100, you've either heard of or experienced some kind of sudden geologic event. Probably several. What stories of geologic upheaval are common in your life?
The emotional aftershocks still reverberate from the January 2010 Haitian earthquake. And there are plenty Alaskans still around after the record 1964 earthquake and tsunami that wreaked such devastation to towns and villages in Alaska.
Californians from Baja to San Francisco ride the jolts and spasms of the San Andreas fault on a regular basis. Their lives and culture reflect an awareness of the power of earthquakes born of urban tragedies over the last century.
Many Alaskans have their flight plans suddenly interrupted by ash billowing from Mt. Redoubt's periodic eruptions. Hawaiians live in full view of the fire-spewing volcanoes that built their landscape. Maybe you experienced the ash fall-out from the devastating 1980 Mt. St. Helen eruption in Oregon.
Most of us remember that terrible day after Christmas 2004 in the Java Sea and Indian Ocean. Or the September 29, 2009 Samoa tragedy as our most recent large scale tsunami event. These events made all the more dramatic to the entire planet because of the immediacy of geographic information systems, the internet and other media.
But have you heard about the 1946 tsunami that obliterated the Scotch Bluff light house in the Aleutians and devastated portions of Hawaii? Or the incredible story of a father and son who rode their fishing boat on a tsunami that reached over 1700 feet high in Lituya Bay on the Gulf of Alaska in 1958?
These stories serve to remind us that dramatic forces have been shaping landscapes long before our ability to remember or record these events -- long before humans walked this quaking Earth.
