GEOL 5640 - Regional Tectonics

• Graduate students are expected to take on a leadership role in the course by mentoring the undergraduates, and by being prepared to lead portions of an Appalachian field trip.
• Graduate students will attain a working familiarity with the processes of plate tectonics, their evolution through time, and their control on the earth’s geologic, climatic and biological history.
• Graduate students will be expected to achieve a higher level of understanding of all of the course material than their younger colleagues and will be assessed accordingly.
• Graduate students will be expected to know those aspects of the course for which a broad familiarity is expected of the undergraduates.
• Graduate students will serve as role models for the undergraduates by presenting the results of their term paper research in the form of a talk, written abstracts of which will be distributed to classmates and the instructor.
• Know the driving mechanisms of plate tectonics and the forces of plate motion.
• Understand Archean granulite-gneiss belts, greenstone belts and crustal evolution and the earliest life forms in the Archean.
• Understand Proterozoic mafic-ultramafic complexes, basins, mobile belts and anorgenic magmatism, and crustal evolution and climate in the Proterozoic.
• Understand crustal heat flow, sea-floor spreading at mid-ocean ridges, and the age-depth relation of ocean basins.
• Understand hot spots, aseismic ridges, and the origin of mantle plumes.
• Understand island arcs and volcanism at convergent plate margins, trenches and back-arc basins, accretionary orogens and the processes of subduction, terrane accretion and continental collision.
• Understand plate tectonics and plate boundaries, the geometry of plate motion, and its link to earthquakes.
• Understand secular variations in earth history, and episodicity in plate tectonics, and the supercontinent cycle.
• Understand the assembly the and break-up of the supercontinent Pangea.
• Understand the geologic evolution of the Caledonian-Appalachian belt.
• Understand the geologic evolution of the North American Cordillera.