Photos of Pacific Coast, Cascades, Columbia Plateau
Geology of the Pacific Northwest
Course Information
Basics
Basics Tables
Focus Pages
Lectures
Virtual Field Sites
Glossary

Note that this is a generic syllabus.

When this course is being taught during a particular academic term for a particular college, a more specific syllabus will be provided which includes links to student support services for those with disabilities, elearning support services for those with technology issues, and other offices, personnel, and policies the college has to help students succeed while the college observes its mission and upholds its legal requirements.

Syllabus

Studying and researching the Earth, the world that not only surrounds us but from which we derive ourselves, is an abiding passion of mine. I enjoy and am committed to sharing this passion, and the methods of fulfilling it, with those who want to study their own version of the Earth, scientifically and objectively, yes, but also locally, experientially, using the best available tools and sources of critically assessed information, and in terms of each person's own personal history. --Dr. Dawes

Abstract (short summary)

Welcome to Geology of the Pacific Northwest. This is a completely online class, including laboratory credit. It does not meet in person.

Each week, you:

By the last week of the quarter you will complete your term project, testing hypotheses you proposed for a field site of your choice.

Course Description

This course is for those who enjoy looking closely at the world around them and want to learn the geology behind the beautiful landscapes of the Northwest. In this course you will examine the present-day geology as well as the geologic history of the Pacific Northwest. Lab work is included. In the labs you will learn by practicing how geological knowledge is deduced from field sites, rocks, sequences of rock layers, fossils, and geologic structures. Topics include plate tectonics, volcanism, rocks and minerals, faults and folds, age determination, map reading, mountain building, and glaciation. Successful completion of the course requires a field excursion to a site chosen by the student. The course includes lab work and counts as 5 credits in a standard Washington state community college academic term.

Instructor Information

Instructor: Dr. Ralph Dawes
Address: Note that materials sent by mail MUST say PNW to get through:
Ralph Dawes PNW
Wenatchee Valley College
1300 Fifth Street
Wenatchee, WA 98801

E-mail: Send email to me through the Canvas Inbox. Canvas email is under the "Inbox" tab.

Make sure you have entered your personal email address into your Canvas settings, so that Canvas Inbox email get forwarded to you.

In Canvas, open your personal "Settings" and add your email address(es) under "Ways to Contact."

To contact me outside of the Canvas learning management system, use my long-term employee email address at Wenatchee Valley College, rdawes@wvc.edu. However, be aware that eventually I will not have an active email account at WVC.

Instructor Biography: Ph.D. in Earth and Planetary Sciences, University of Washington, 1993. Born and raised in Edmonds, on Puget Sound north of Seattle in the state of Washington. Started teaching geology in 1985; started teaching at community college in 1992. Currently teaches earth sciences (geology, meteorology, astronomy) full time at Wenatchee Valley College, and part time at other selected colleges online. Actively involved since 1995 in using technology to help provide more wide-ranging and multidimensional, yet still highly interactive and personally engaging, opportunities for learning.

Textbook and Technology Requirements

Textbook: No textbook is required for this course. The necessary text is provided in the form of Pacific Northwest Geology web pages online in the PNW Geology website.

Computer Requirements: Computer with reliable internet service connection and an up-to-date web browser such as a recent edition of Chrome or Mozilla Firefox. Access to a printer, preferably color. Or, if you do not have a printer and are unable to go to campus to use a printer, you must have the skills and software to draw accuately and in detail on a computer, on digital images.

You are responsible for having regular internet access to the class.

If internet access fails, or if your computer fails to work, then it is up to you to go elsewhere to obtain internet access and use of a working computer.

FERPA and Confidentiality

FERPA, the Family Educational Rights and Responsibility Act, is a federal law designed to protect the privacy of educational records by limiting access to these records, to establish the right of students to inspect and review their educational records and to provide guidelines for the correction of inaccurate and misleading data through informal and formal hearings.

Items that can never be identified as public information are a student’s social security number, citizenship, gender, grades, or class schedule. All efforts will be made in this class to protect your privacy and to ensure confidential treatment of information associated with or generated by your participation in the class.

Course Pre-Requisites

Before taking this class, you should have the following abilities.

Learning Outcomes

Upon completion of this course, you will:

  1. Have a much greater awareness and understanding of the geologic origins and activities of the land around you.
  2. Be able to describe the geologic history of the Pacific Northwest, from Archean basement and Proterozoic Belt Supergroup, through terrane accretion, subduction, and mountain building, to Pleistocene glacial effects and recent geologic activity. (You will also know what all the specialized terms mean.)
  3. Be able to point out on a map all the landscape regions of the Pacific Northwest, such as the Columbia Plateau, Snake River Plain, and Rocky Mountains, and explain how they relate to Northwest geologic history,
  4. Be able to identify several of the most common minerals and rocks.
  5. Be able to describe the origin of most common rock types, and explain how a rock reveals its origin.
  6. Be able to determine from stratigraphy and structure, and list in proper order, a relative geologic age sequence.
  7. Be able to correlate key aspects of Pacific Northwest geology with plate tectonic theory.
  8. Be able to correlate geologic features with how they are portrayed on a map, recognizing such basic fault and fold types as anticlines, synclines, and thrust faults.
  9. Be able to recognize and describe field evidence of continental glaciation and glacial lake outburst flooding.
  10. Be able to interpret geologic history from field evidence, as demonstrated in a report based on a field excursion that includes labeled drawings or photographs of geologic features observed in the field.
  11. Given a geologic map and a line of cross-section on the map, be able to recognize, label, and add the mapped geologic formations and the standard geologic structure symbols correctly to a cross-section which has the line of cross-section as its top edge.
  12. Be able to use facts or observations to distinguish a valid hypothesis from an invalid one, and demonstrate this ability in lab work and written assignments.
  13. Upon visiting any of the different landscape regions of the Pacific Northwest in person, be able to recognize and summarize their geologic origins.

Course Schedule

Fall, Winter, and Spring quarters are 10 weeks, asynchronous. For details of weekly activities, go to the Course Schedule.

Note: Summer quarters are 8 weeks long. Nonetheless, you are required to cover as many topics and spend as much time studying and learning as during a 10-week quarter, because you are earning exactly the same credits. As a result, there may be two weeks during summer quarter in which you take two quizzes and perform two labs. You will be notified of this in the online classroom when it occurs.

Methods of Learning

Course Policies FOLLOW COLLLEGE POLICIES

Academic standards that you are expected to adhere to in this course are, to begin with, those published in the college Student Handbook. Pay attention to the policies and procedures in the handbook related to academic behavior, academic honesty including plagiarism and use of generative AI, and academic standards.

Plagiarism is grounds for flunking a course. Among the several possible forms of plagiarism, copied images and paraphrased text (sections of text included within your text, or having only some of their words changed) count as plagiarism if not clearly credited to the sources from which they were taken. If you plagiarize, when it is first detected, you will be given a warning and opportunity to eliminate copying and paraphrasing, eliminate plagiarism in other words, from your work. Further such infractions of true, honest learning, by committing copying and paraphrasing, can then lead to the record of your plagiarism being put into your academic record along with an F for the class on your transcript.

Stay focused on the positive. Learning is a thrill and a privilege that we all get to enjoy, and the only work you submit that helps you learn is the work - word combinations, ideas, and images - that you create yourself.

"Disorderly Conduct
Any student whose conduct obstructs or disrupts educational processes or other activities of the college shall be subject to disciplinary action. In the case of disorderly conduct in the classroom, the instructor may take reasonable action against any student and recommend disciplinary action by the vice president of student services."

"Sexual Harassment
Students must abide by the college’s Sexual Harassment Policy. Any student who engages in behaviors such as unwelcome sexual advances, requests for sexual favors and other verbal or physical conduct or written communication of a sexual nature directed toward another person shall be subject to disciplinary action. If you have experienced or witnessed sexual harassment or sexual violence please report it to the Title IX Coordinator at (509) 682-6445 or to a faculty or staff member on campus."

Methods of Assessment

See Grading Rubrics. Note that on the quizzes and lab answer forms, you are allowed a second attempt. If you submit a second set of answers, only the score from the second set of answers is kept in the grades. The highest score is not kept unless it is the score on the second attempt. Happily, the second score is the highest score in nearly all cases. The score from the two attempts is not averaged. Answers from the two attempts are not combined. If a second attempt at a weekly quiz or at a lab answer form is submitted, only the second attempt is taken into account. Also, and this is important, on a lab answer form that includes essay questions as well as machine-graded (usually multiple-choice) questions, the machine-graded questions cannot earn any credit unless a serious attempt at an answer is submitted on all the essay questions.

Late Policy

Regardless of the reason, work that is turned in late will not receive full credit. In addition, there is no guarantee that late work will receive any credit whatsoever. Work that is less than a week late might, by prior arrangement, receive partial credit, but never full credit, and again, there is no guarantee it will ever receive any credit once it is late, regardless of any discussions or correspondence with the instructor. Work more than a week late is not opened and therefore not graded.

Work that arrives after the scheduled last day of the online quarter is also not opened.

It is much better to turn in an imperfect paper on time than to turn in a perfect one late.

Quizzes and written lab answers that are not submitted the standard way through the online classroom will not be eligible for full credit.

Grading Policy

Grades will be based on point values assigned to the assessments described above, with an A grade for a total of 90% or more of all the possible points, B 80-85%, C 70-75%, D 58-65%. *

Plus (+) or minus (-) grades are assigned to values in-between those listed.

Students cannot be awarded an A+ grade, nor can they earn a D- grade, because those two grades are not allowed by the Wenatchee Valley College registrar.

Table of Points Used for Course Grade
Assignment
points
times
total points
Weekly Discussion (prpn)
20

10
200
Weekly Quiz (Qz)
10
10
100
Weekly Summary (Sum)
10
10
100
Labs*1
30
10
300
Term Project Plan
10
1
10
Term Project Written Summary
20
1
20
Term Project*2
125
1
125
grand total
855

Note*1-- Labs 1, 2, 4, 6, and 8 are worth 35 points each.

Labs 3, 5, 7, 9, and 10 are worth 25 points each.

That averages out to 30 points per lab.

The labs that are worth 35 points are the labs that include maps and diagrams, which you are required to draw and label geologically.

Note*2-- Less than 60% of knowledge advancement points for the entirety of the class, AND not performing a term project, results in an F for the class.

 

Student Rights and Responsibilities

RIGHTS

You have the right to expect that your instructor will:

RESPONSIBILITIES

As a student, you have the responsibility to:

Instructions for Using Course Content web pages

The content of this course contained in web pages organized into five categories-Home-Course Information, Lectures, Basics, Focus Pages, and Virtual Field Sites. As an aid to navigating the course website, links to the index of each category are included at the top and bottom of each page. The index page for each category provides direct links to each of the individual pages within that category. To make the most of these web pages, please read and follow the instructions below.

How to Use Basics Pages

The Basics Pages explain the essential topics of physical geology that are needed to understand the geology of the Pacific Northwest. For most students, especially those who have not had a previous college-level course in geology, the basics pages are a quick way to get up to speed on the basic geological knowledge that provides the foundation on which the rest of the course is built. If you have already taken a course in physical geology, then the basics pages will be a review. Either way, you should read and study them as instructed.

You will be referred to the relevant Basics Pages in the lectures as the quarter proceeds. Along with each week's lecture, read the referenced Basics Pages. As you study the Focus Pages and Virtual Field Sites, refer to the Basics Pages for any basic geological topic that you need to have clarified. Many of the Basics Pages provide links to outside websites that offer additional discussion of the topic.

How to Use Focus Pages

The Focus Pages explain the main geological themes in the geologic history of the Pacific Northwest. They provide detailed examples of places, rocks, and geologic structures in the Northwest and help you to understand how they originated. The Focus Pages also link things together. They link the geologic basics to examples of how they apply to the geology of the Northwest. They link the course website with outside websites that provide you with further information to explore.

The weekly lectures will refer you to the Focus Pages that will help you gain more insight into the weekly topics. Each week, read the focus pages to which you are referred. As time allows, study as much as you can of the information on the other, outside websites listed in the Focus Pages.

How to Use Virtual Field Sites

The Virtual Field Sites enable you to make geologic field trips while sitting at a computer. The geology of the earth itself is the source of geologic knowledge, and the best way to study it is to see it in place, in the field. That is what the Virtual Field Sites allow you to do.

Each Virtual Field Site consists of four parts.

  1. An introduction gives you a written summary of the key features of the site next to a representative photograph of the site.
  2. A sequence of thumbnail pictures is accompanied by detailed captions that describe what each thumbnail illustrates. To see a thumbnail picture as a larger picture and study it in detail, click on it.
  3. A location map shows you where the field site is located in the Pacific Northwest.
  4. A stratigraphic column summarizes the sequence of rock formations present at the field site.

The stratigraphic column is important because it represents the sequence of geologic history at the Virtual Field Site. The stratigraphic columns generally follow the tradition of starting with the oldest layer at the bottom and proceeding up to the youngest layer at the top. The causes of exceptions to this rule, such as a thrust fault causing older rocks to sit on top of younger rocks, will be made clear in the stratigraphic column. Be sure to examine the stratigraphic column at the end of each Virtual Field Site.

How to Use the Glossary

Geologic terms used in the course website are defined in the glossary web page. In each Basics page and Focus Page, the terms that appear in the glossary are linked to it, usually the first time they appear in the text. At the end of each Basics Page, Focus Page, and Virtual Field Site, the glossary terms used are listed and linked to the Glossary.

It is recommended that the first time you read through a course web page you not click on the linked glossary terms. The general meaning of many of the terms will be suggested by the context, and it is important to read each page completely.

After you have read all the way through the text, click on those terms you do not know and read their definitions. The second time you read through the text you can click on a linked term when it appears within the text. You also have the alternative option of referring to the complete list of linked glossary terms provided at the end of each page.

Finally, if you encounter a geologic term you are not sure of, but it does not appear linked to the glossary, you can open the glossary yourself and look up the term.

If you encounter what you think is an important geologic term and find that it is not in the glossary, please let the instructor know.

How to Proceed Through a Week of Pacific Northwest Geology

The course proceeds on a week-by-week basis. To successfully proceed through a week in the class, follow this guideline.

  1. Read the weekly agenda. The agenda lists the goals and learning activities for the week. It also gives you the weekly discussion question(s).
  2. Read the weekly lecture. The beginning of the lecture tells you which Basics Pages and Focus Pages to read. It is important to study them; they are the online textbook for the course. The lecture weaves together the main topics for the week.
  3. After reading the weekly lecture and the relevant Basics and Focus Pages, take the weekly online pre-quiz.
    • the pre-quiz has the same questions on it as will be on the full quiz that is due at the end of the week
    • the pre-quiz is due several days before the end of the week
    • for making the attempt and answering all the questions on it as best you can, your pre-quiz score will revert to over 100% of the points possible on it, within a few days of you submitting it

  4. Send in your first contribution to the weekly discussion early in the week.
    • During the first three days.
    • Your participation in the weekly discussion is a key part of your participation and counts for a large part of your grade.
    • Continue to make contributions to the weekly discussion as the week proceeds.

      The online discussion is a very effective method for you to improve your understanding and deepen your knowledge of the geology of the Pacific Northwest, working with, sharing with, and learning from other students in the discussion.

      You cannot pass the class without being involved in the weekly discussions. Failure to participate in weekly discussions for more than one week in a row will start to earn negative participation points in the weekly grade for discussion participation, bottoming out at -10 points per week after several weeks of absence from the discussions.

      Maximum performance in an online weekly discussion is achieved by being: EARLY: Make your first significant postings during the first three days of the week.

      Other aspects of a performance in the weekly discussion are as follows:

      GOOD: Add richness, depth, detail, pictures (with sources cited), or personal experiences to some of what you post.
      OFTEN: Read and add messages to the discussion on at least three different days over the course of the week, including late in the week as well as early.
      RIGHT: Be accurate (correct) in statements and assertions you make about geologic facts and theories.
      ORIGINAL: Write your own text, as opposed to copying or paraphrasing from other sources.
      REFERENCED: Cite any sources you read and gain information from that you use in a posting. (But, again, write the post in your own words, phrases, and sentences).

    1. Complete the lab assignment for the week, which includes one or more assigned Virtual Field Trips.
      1. Each lab has at least two steps for you to complete the lab, and those steps are to:
        • completely answer and submit the pre-lab answer form by the day it is due, several days prior to the end of the week

          • you do not have to get your answers all correct on a pre-lab answer form in order to earn 100% of the possible points; what you must do is answer, as best you can, ALL the questions on it, leaving no questions unanswered

            • then you can study the results of your pre-lab to see which parts you did not yet understand, which will help you focus your studying for the higher-credit lab answer form that is due at the end of the week, on which only correct answers earn points
              • the same questions are on the lab answer form as are on the pre-lab answer form
                the higher-credit lab answer form due at the end of the week is the second step to completing your labs

      2. the second step to complete the lab is the full-credit lab answer form (which is worth more points than the pre-lab by close to 1000%), which is due by the last day of the week
                • on the full-credit lab answer form,

                  all questions must be answered to the best of your knowledge if you are to have a chance at a high score on your lab answer form

                • Leaving a question unanswered earns the negative point equivalent for that question. For example, not answering a 2-point question earns -2 points.
                  • Why?
                    • To honor the courage, the bravery, of those who do try to answer the question. They may not answer the question correctly, and therefore may not earn any points for their effort, getting a zero score on that question, but at least they were brave and strong enough, had enough resolve and commitment to learning, to try answering it. That is worth more than not even trying, hence the negative score for not even trying.
                • if there are no lab diagrams (things to draw, maps to mark and label, or geologic photos to mark and label) then you are done with the lab after completing (completely, and on time) the pre-lab answer form and (completely, and on time) the lab answer form
            • if there are lab diagrams (things to draw, maps to mark and label, or geologic photos to mark and label), which are part of the lab assignment, then that is the third and final step to complete a lab exercise
              • lab diagrams must be submitted digitally (NOT by email) no later than the day after the lab answer form has come due
              • labs 1, 2, 4, 6, and 8 have lab diagrams for you to draw on, label, and submit as part of the lab
              • lab assignments turned in more than a day late will not receive full credit and have no guarantee of receiving any credit. Assignments more than a week late will not earn any credit unless prior arrangement was made with the instructor.

                • If your first or second attempt on a lab diagram exercise is not as successful as you want, and you think you have subsequently seen how to make it work successfully,

                  you can make up to three attempts total on a lab diagram.

                  This will maximize how much you learn and the number of points you earn as a result.
  1. After reading the weekly lecture and the relevant Basics and Focus Pages, AND after studying the results on your pre-quiz, AND after asking the instructor any questions you may have, take the full-credit quiz
    • the full-credit quiz had the same questions on it as the full-credit quiz
    • the full-credit quiz is due by the last day of the week
    • only correct answers allow you to earn points on the full-credit quiz

  2. At the end of the week, after completing all your other work, write your weekly summary. Take the time to thoroughly reflect on what you learned and write a thoughtful summary. Your summary should be 150 to 250 words in length. It is also one more chance to ask questions about the learning topics. Your weekly summary is VERY important. It is a chance for you to summarize what you learned and use some of the terminology you learned during the week.

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Geology of the Pacific Northwest
Syllabus
updated: 6/29/2022