Earthly Delights, Term 2

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Earthly Delights (and Frights)

Course Description
Come with us on an armchair journey using a wealth of pictures and videos of familiar and
unfamiliar physical features of the earth. During the course our journey will take us to
regions and places which feature a wide diversity of interesting, unusual, spectacular and
frightening landforms and features including volcanoes, rivers, mountains, earthquakes,
deserts and coastal landforms. We will seek to provide insights into how they were formed,
their distribution, their distinctive processes and how they impact life on Earth.

Outline SESSIONS
(All sessions start at 10am)

Main Topics

  1. 29/04/2021 Why doesn’t the Earth have a smooth surface?
    What’s underneath the surface? How solid is it?
    (Structure of the crust, rock types, geological layers, deep
    interior)
  1. 06/05/2021 How deep is the ocean? Is the Pacific really peaceful?
    (Oceans and seas basins, distribution, land/water interaction,
    ocean currents, types of islands, wave action, evolution of
    coastlines)
  2. 13/05/2021 Watering the land – Streams, rivers, lakes and valleys
    (Streams, rivers and slope, flood plains, effects on landforms,
    spectacular waterfalls, flood plains and deltas, streams and rock
    structure, waterfalls, formation of lakes, drainage patterns)
  3. 20/05/2021 Arid zones and desert features. (Weathering through water and wind in arid regions, types of deserts, effects of different rock structures, landforms associated with deserts)
  4. 27/05/2021 Lumps, bumps, ridges and grooves in the surface (Land surface folding, faulting, mountain structures, notable trenches and rifts, effects on drainage, dividing ranges cold climate glacial action, fiords, glacial landforms)
  5. 03/06/2021 Pressure sores and bubbles that burst! Live, sleeping and dead ones (Volcanoes around the world. Types of volcanic activity, cones, craters, and calderas, types of extrusions, the impact of lava flows, geysers, Volcanoes of Victoria)
  6. 10/06/2021 Fractures – quaking with fright. (Types of faults, tremors and quakes – intensity, frequency and distribution, contrasts between Australian and NZ seismology).
  7. 17/06/2021 The Gippsland Region. (Gippsland as a case study of types of landforms, drainage systems, folds and faults and seismic activity)
  8. 24/06/2021 The land, sea and gas bubble in space in which we experience these earthly delights and frights.