The Elements Unearthed

What does it mean for one to be globally competent?

This page is where I will post links to resources related to global education and global competency as part of my experiences in Indonesia for the Teachers for Global Classrooms Program. I will be traveling to Indonesia for four weeks this summer (2017) from July 13 through August 8. I will spend an initial week and a final three days in Jakarta learning about their education system, then travel to Borneo to the province of South Kalimantan to work with a host teacher (Mr. Muhammad Nazaruddin) at SMA Negeri 1 in Mandastana, an area north of Banjarmasin. After the official TGC program ends, I will extend my stay for another five days to visit Yogyakarta and Bali and learn even more about the history, culture, geology, and chemical heritage of Indonesia.

I hope to write many blog posts on this adventure. I plan to visit cacao plantations, indigo dye works, rubber plantations, learn batik dyeing, see wayang puppet shows and Ramayana ballet, hear gamelon music,  learn some Bahasa Indonesia, try out many types of cuisine, observe the incredible biodiversity of Indonesia, learn silversmithing in Kota Gede, climb the steps of ancient Hindu and Buddhist temples, and explore the calderas of at least two active volcanoes. Oh, and maybe walk on a beach or two.

In preparation for this adventure I have taken an online course on global education through the Teachers for Global Classrooms program and have found many useful resources related to my coming experience that I wish to share on this page. This will be a work in progress, so please return often to check the resource links out. I will include some annotation so you can see a description of what the resource is, why I think its useful, and how to use it.

Using Earth Explorer, a new resource created by the U.S. Geological Survey to include all available GIS data.

Resource 1: Earth Explorer 

https://earthexplorer.usgs.gov/
Description:
This is a new resource created by the U.S. Geological Survey and acts as a one-stop shopping center for digital elevation models (DEMs) of anywhere on Earth. Previously, one had to search through many websites to find all this data. Now it is all available here. On my recent trip to Houston to the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, the USGS had a booth that explained Earth Explorer and they were happy to hear that I was already using it.
Uses:
Teaching Earth Science and Geology courses, or Geography, with lesson plans on comparative geological features and the geography of various countries and states. For example, I will us it to compare the composite volcanoes of Indonesia with those of Washington State, or the fissure eruptions of Utah, or the shield volcanoes of Hawaii or Mars.
Using Earth Explorer:
(1) In the search bar, type in the name or the coordinates of the landform or region you wish to download. then click “Show.” A list of areas with that name will appear, and you should click on the one that you want. If your landform doesn’t show up, it may be that the particular quadrangle doesn’t have that as its name and you may need to think of a nearby, more prominent feature. Or you can simply click the location on the world map.

A 3D rendering of Gunung Batur on the Indonesian island of Bali. The model shows it is a double-walled caldera, and the flat area to the right inside the caldera is a crater lake. This was made using a grayscale height map from Earth Explorer by the USGS.

(2) Once you click on the correct name, the marker will move to the correct area on the map. You then need to click on the “Datasets” button at the bottom of the column. What dataset you choose depends on what you want to do, but there are many possibilities here. This is GIS heaven. In my case, I want to download a grayscale height map for making 3D terrains, so I open up the Digital Elevation tab. There are many datasets even here.
(3) The best one for most world areas, such as Indonesia, seems to be the Aster Global DEM data, so I check that box and choose the “Results” button at the bottom. A thumbnail of the grayscale data comes up, which I click to bring up a medium format image and metadata, then I click on the medium sized image to bring up the final large image by itself, which I download and load into my 3D modeling software.

Resource 2: MIT BLOSSOMS Project

Link:   https://blossoms.mit.edu/

MIT BLOSSOMS (Blended Learning Open Source Science or Math Studies) is a project developed by Dr. Richard Larson of MIT to bring high-quality blended learning science and math lessons to developing countries around the world. Teachers volunteer to create video lessons, which include a student video and a teacher instructional video. During the lessons, the video is stopped by the local teacher so that the students in his or her class can do an activity suggested by the lesson, thereby making the videos interactive. Written lesson plans can be downloaded, and the videos have been translated into many languages including Mandarin, Finnish, Urdu, Farsi, etc. I have not seen them in Bahasa Indonesia yet, but some are available in Malay including our own lesson plan.

MIT BLOSSOMS homepage

My media design and creative computing students at Walden School of Liberal Arts created a video for this project in 2013 about using trigonometric parallax to find the distances to nearby stars. I taught this same lesson at SMAN 1 Mandastana in Borneo in July, 2017 as part of the Teachers for Global Classrooms program, then shared the MIT BLOSSOMS resource to 40 teachers from the surrounding area as part of a professional development training we did at the school.

Here is the direct link to our lesson plan:

https://blossoms.mit.edu/videos/lessons/parallax_activity_measuring_
distances_nearby_stars

The MIT BLOSSOMS page for our parallax lesson.

Resource 3: Realtime Earthquake Data – U.S. Geological Survey:

This site shows all earthquakes recorded in the last day or more (you can change the time frame) with epicenter location, including Latitude and Longitude and depth in kilometers and the magnitude of the earthquake on the Richter scale. The data can be downloaded directly into an Excel spreadsheet and analyzed. It also shows a zoomable map with locations of the earthquakes showing as colored circles; the larger the circle, the higher the magnitude. The major tectonic plate boundaries are also shown. This is an excellent resource for earth science classes and shows the global scale of tectonic processes. A good use for this would be to chart a week’s worth of data, then plot the major population centers on the planet to see what cities are in danger zones, or to create a map of longitude and latitude and continental edges only but no tectonic plate, then have the students map the earthquakes over a week or two and infer the plate boundaries from the locations of the earthquakes. You could also discuss why some earthquakes (such as Hawaii or Missouri or Utah) don’t occur at known plate margins and what that might mean.

Here is the link to the webpage:

https://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/map

Here is a screenshot of the website:

Earthquake data from the U.S. Geological Survey. The orange dots are of different sizes to show magnitudes of earthquakes. Notice that most of the dots occur on or near the plate borders (red lines) but that the Hawaii earthquake does not. The Alaska earthquakes are near the fault boundary on the surface but not right on – this indicates they are very deep. Also notice that many of the earthquakes are occurring along the Indonesia subduction zone. The biggest earthquake this day was on the island of Vanuatu. I’d like to go there, some day, earthquakes or not.

Here is a map of earthquakes for the last seven days (today is Oct. 3, 2017) not including today. Notice the swarms of aftershocks around Mexico City.

Resource 4: Volcanic Caldera Database

This resource is a bit harder to use but ultimately very handy for an earth science class. It is in the form of an Excel spreadsheet compiled from many sources, so not all of the fields are filled in. But the upper set of data is complete with latitudes and longitudes of volcanic calderas around the world, the basic size (on a scale of 100 for the biggest eruption known – the Toba Caldera Explosion of 74,000 years ago. On this scale, Mt. St. Helens is a minor eruption at 6.

I will be using this in my earth science classes to create a chart of the locations of major caldera explosions, their locations and severity, as a grayscale height map. If you create a grid on a piece of graph paper representing longitude and latitude, then write in the severity as a number in the grid (if more than two eruptions have occurred in the same area, you could add the numbers to get a sum). The data can then be typed into a non-formatted TXT file (Word can save it this way) with commas between the numbers and a new row for each level of latitude and zeros where no eruptions have occurred). The program Image J (next resource) can convert the numbered list into a grayscale height map and from there into a 3D terrain in your favorite modeling program.

Here is the link to the database:

https://www.geog.cam.ac.uk/research/projects/lveed/

This is a screenshot of the webpage:

This the website for downloading the volcanic caldera data. It is located at the Department of Geology at Cambridge University. There is a link to the caldera data or to ignimbrite (volcanic lava flows) data. You can chart this and see the locations of plate boundaries.

Resource 5: Image J 

This is a free program developed by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) used for analyzing geographic images and biological data, such as counts or areas of cultures in a petri dish. It can also be used for charting data in a three-dimensional space as a height map.

This program can also load in the Mars MOLA and Moon LOLA data. You will need to know the exact data dimensions (rows and columns) in pixels and bit depth (16 bit) and select 16-bit signed data from the pull down list. I will add a link to instructions for using the Mars data further down.

Here is the link to the Image J program. It is free:

https://imagej.nih.gov/ij/download.html

Here is a grayscale height map of part of Mars turned into a color image inside ImageJ using MOLA data.

Mars MOlA data of the Syrtis Major area of Mars inside ImageJ with a color lookup table applied.