DIGITAL GEOLOGY OF IDAHO: NEW WEB-BASED TEACHING TOOL

The Digital Atlas of Idaho website (http://imnh.isu.edu/digitalatlas) now contains a NSF Geoscience Education-supported Digital Geology of Idaho link. This will become a self-contained teaching unit for an upper-division undergraduate Idaho Geology course. Fifteen topical units will contain PowerPoint units with text information and photographs, digital copies of published papers, and three-dimensional GIS-based flythroughs, all tied to a new 1:1,000,000-scale digital geologic map of Idaho.

These topical components include 1. Teton, Albion and Pioneer Ranges: Slices of the Middle Crust, 2. Mesoproterozoic Belt Supergroup; 3. Idaho's Mining Wealth: Silver Valley; 4. Accreted Terranes, Western Idaho Suture Zone and Hells Canyon; 5. Mesozoic Idaho Batholith; 6. Challis Magmatic Episode and Trans-Challis Mineralization; 7. Overthrust Belt; 8. Neogene Snake River Plain-Yellowstone Volcanic Province; 9. Columbia River Basalt Province; 10. Basin and Range Province; 11. Snake River Plain Aquifer; 12. Pleistocene Mountain Glaciation; 13. Palouse landscape and post-glacial climate change; 14. Lake Missoula Floods; 15. Lake Bonneville Flood. Self-contained web-based laboratory exercises for Physical and Historical Geology, and Physical Geography courses at Idaho State University and Lewis-Clark State College have been developed and are being improved using student knowledge surveys. Other parts of the website include maps and teaching data for an Idaho Historical Geography course.