60 YEARS OF FIELD EDUCATION: THE JUDSON MEAD GEOLOGIC FIELD STATION OF INDIANA UNIVERSITY

The Judson Mead Geologic Field Station of Indiana University has been the site of field education and research for over 60 years. The site was selected by Charles Deiss because of the confluence of the three major structural styles of the Western Cordillera of North America – the basement involved block uplifts of Laramide style; the fold and thrust shortening of the Seiver style; and the extensional basin development of the Basin and Range style of deformation. The stratigraphic section available for study in the immediate region spans from 3.2 Ga metamorphic complexes to the Belt Supergroup to the Paleozoic, Mesozoic, and Cenozoic stratigraphic packages that reflect various depositional settings and tectonic influences. The core of the curriculum offered through the primary courses, G329 and G429, emphasizes individual field learning. The various projects are designed to build on one another with increasing levels of sophistication. The curriculum design emphasizes individual decision making through problem based learning experiences. This emphasis on traditional practices and individual work separates the IU field courses from many others. Over the past 10 years a set of exercises designed to focus on environmental, economic, and seismic risk assessment have been developed. These projects have been designed to incorporate team activities that are instrument intensive providing opportunities for collaborative learning as well as the use of professional level equipment and data sets. For those projects involving igneous and metamorphic rocks, photomicrographs of thin sections from representative samples as well as bulk chemical and isotopic data have been obtained to complement the field observations, permitting a more comprehensive data base upon which the students can make their interpretations. Plans for the summer of 2010 include an extension of these concepts to include a geophysical option including TLS, RTK GPS, and seismic reflection as well as expansion of our stratigraphic work to incorporate sequence stratigraphic concepts for portions of the Mississippian carbonate packages.