Unit 1: Slip-sliding away: case study landslides in Italy and Peru
How have mass-wasting events affected communities, and what lessons have we learned from these natural disasters that might help us mitigate future hazards? In this unit, students answer these questions by being ...

Exploring California's Plate Motion and Deformation with GPS | Lessons on Plate Tectonics
Students analyze data to study the motion of the Pacific and North American tectonic plates. From GPS data, students detect relative motion between the plates in the San Andreas fault zone--with and without earthquakes. To get to that discovery, they use physical models to understand the architecture of GPS, from satellites to sensitive stations on the ground. They learn to interpret time series data collected by stations (in the spreading regime of Iceland), to cast data as horizontal north-south and east-west vectors, and to add those vectors head-to-tail.Students then apply their skills and understanding to data in the context of the strike-slip fault zone of a transform plate boundary. They interpret time series plots from an earthquake in Parkfield, CA to calculate the resulting slip on the fault and (optionally) the earthquake's magnitude.

Unit 2: Global Sea-Level Response to Temperature Changes: Temperature and Altimetry Data
What is the contribution of seawater thermal expansion to recent sea-level rise? In this unit, students create time-series graphs of global averaged sea surface temperature anomaly (SSTA) data spanning 1880–2017 ...

Unit 2: Kinematic GPS/GNSS Methods
The application of Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) in the earth sciences has become commonplace. GNSS data can be collected rapidly and compared in common reference frames. Real-time kinematic (RTK) GNSS ...

Unit 1: Exploring the Reservoirs and Pathways and Methods to Measure the Hydrologic Cycle
How does water move throughout the Earth system? How do scientists measure the amount of water that moves through these pathways? This unit provides an alternative way for students to learn the major components of ...

Unit 2: Kilauea Hawai'i - Monday Morning Meeting at the USGS Hawai'i Volcano Observatory
How do volcanologists at the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory monitor volcanoes? In a jigsaw format, students first work in teams to learn one of the four volcano monitoring data sets (GPS, Tilt, Seismic and InSAR) and ...

Unit 3: Understanding landslide factors
How do slope characteristics and magnitude of forces dictate whether or not a slope will fail? Can environmental and built characteristics change the magnitude of these forces? In this unit, students qualitatively ...

Unit 2: Reading the landscape
How do geologic, hydrologic, biologic, and built-landscape features manifest themselves on maps? In this unit, students will use topographic maps, hillshade maps, and aerial imagery to learn to recognize a variety ...

Unit 5: Mitigating future disasters: developing a mass-wasting hazard map
This unit serves as the summative assessment of the Surface Process Hazards module. In September 2013, the Boulder area of Colorado experienced an extreme rain event that led to mass wasting in many areas. This has ...

Unit 4: Groundwater, GPS, and Water Resources
GPS data can measure ground elevation change in response to the changing amount of groundwater in valleys and snow cover in mountains. In this module, students will learn how to read GPS data to interpret how the ...