Students in geology courses, whether an introductory course designed for non-majors or an advanced course for majors and minors, benefit from hands-on experience with the kind of laboratory or field equipment that professional geologists use.  Many of these courses utilize the local geology as an outdoor laboratory to illustrate classroom concepts, demonstrate field tools and methods, and to enable students to apply concepts and tools to real geologic problems.        

Geol 470 Field Seminar

Field experience is an important part of the education of a geologist. While the local geology provides a natural laboratory for both introductory and advanced courses in geology, a field seminar is offered each fall to geology majors and minors to introduce them to regional geologic problems as well. It provides practical experience through the examination of a wide variety of lithologies, landforms and geologic relations, such as  unconformities, erosional surfaces, faults and folds in natural settings.  Problem-solving exercises emphasize basic principles of geologic science.  Students keep a daily field notebook during the trip and participate in exercises that culminate a final project presented at the fall poster symposium on campus.

Bedrock formations in Ohio are fairly horizontal, dipping east or west at only 1-3 degrees.  Regionally, rock types are dolomites, limestones, and shales.  One of the purposes of Field Seminar is visit locations with different rock types and structures.  The 2009 Field Seminar will visit the Appalachian Plateau and Valley and Ridge physiographic provinces of West Virgina. The focus of the trip will be on the structural geology - folding and faulting - of rocks in the Valley and Ridge province, the geologic history of their formation, and the relation between lithology, structure, and landforms. Students from the 2006 seminar are perched on the Tuscarora Formation at Seneca Rocks National Park, West Virginia.

Field seminars are also conducted in the Mammoth Cave area of west-central Kentucky and the St. Francis Mountains of southeastern Missouri. 

In 2008, students and faculty traveled to west-central Kentucky, the Mammoth Cave region, to examine the stratigraphy, surface water hydrology, and groundwater hydrogeology of caves and cave formation.  We used an electrical resistivity ground imaging system to explore for caves on the property of Diamond Caverns, a commercial cave just south of Mammoth Cave National Park.  Caves are readily detected using electrical resistivity methods because air is a poor conductor of electrical current and exhibits very high resistivity relative to surrounding limestone.  The purpose of the seminar was to explore the potential relation between known passage and an adjacent sinkhole to the northeast, which was enlarged to reveal a large sediment-filled passage.  Four profiles, arranged in a zigzag pattern extending from known passage, revealed multiple cave passages trending adjacent, but not connected to the main Diamond Caverns passage.  Using an electrode spacing of 6 m, the maximum depth of the profiles ranged from 30-40 m.  Resistivity values for limestone locally ranged from 500-4000 ohm-m.  Cave passages exhibited resistivities greater than 11,000 ohm-m.  Passage shapes were tubular with widths as great as 14 m and maximum heights of 10 m, consistent with Diamond Cavern passage.  The floor of the passages defined by ERGI occur between 187-203 m above sea level (9-19 m below the surface) and ceiling elevations range from 194-210 m (5-10 m below the surface).  Tubular zones of similar dimension and elevation range and which align with proposed cave passages, but with resistivities between 6000-7000 ohm-m, likely represent sediment filled passages.  Both types of passages lie within the range of elevations for the commercial passages of Diamond Caverns, and their scale and elevation suggest they formed contemporaneously.  Results from the seminar were presented at the North Central Geological Society of America meeting in Rockford, Illinois, and the Ohio Academy of Science meeting, held at Wittenberg.

The nearest igneous rocks are in southeastern Missouri in the St. Francis Mountains.  In the Missouri field seminar, students study the relation between rock type, landform, and landform development.