THE ART OF THE EARTH: USING GOOGLE EARTH AS A TEACHING TOOL IN FRESHMAN EXPLORATION

The University of Tennessee takes pride in having a wide array of Freshman seminars. Freshman seminars are 1-credit courses that meet one time per week and have three main goals: (1) to provide freshman with an experience that expands their viewpoint of the world, (2) to highlight how topics in higher education can be integrated in a variety of ways, and (3) to give them the opportunity to learn new techniques or ways of observing the world around them. I have used The Art of the Earth as a mechanism for exploring basic scientific principles and how we understand the Earth around us. Very few freshman students have had direct experience in the geosciences, but they all have had numerous art classes and understand art as a mechanism for expression. Each week, the students use Google Earth to explore the Earth’s esthetic qualities. They turn in a PowerPoint presentation that highlights their examples (thereby learning to construct effective presentations) and provide a short paragraph of what they see (thereby practicing articulating their thoughts). In class, we then use these examples to learn about the basic scientific principles that underlie their examples. We start with the exploration of color. Students often find the bubble-gum pink lakes of South Australia (driven by halophilic microbes), the vivid blue-green of glacial lakes (driven by glacial flour), and the ochre-striped hills of China (driven by oxidation state of iron minerals). In class, we then learn about wavelengths of light and the additive and subtractive principles that determine the colors we see (which leads to atmospheric chemistry, albedo, and photosynthesis in the oceans). We then turn to curvilinear features to explore rivers, lava flows, and glaciers (to explore fluids and viscosity); circular features to explore lakes, volcanoes, and craters; we explore the many shapes of desert dunes; and we use the concept of bending and breaking to explore folding and faulting and diapirism. We then explore similar topics on Mars and the Moon to compare their similarities and differences to the Earth. Finally, we hand-make oil paint from natural rock pigments, and students are provide brushes and a canvas to all students so that they can use these paints for a final project of their own art.