Bachelor of Elementary Education (BEED)

LEARNING MODULE

Module Number 5 Plate Tectonics, Volcanoes, Geologic Deep Time

Subject Code:
Subject Description: EARTH SCIENCE
Term: 1st Semester Academic Year 2022-2023

I. Learning Objectives:

Upon completion of this module, the students will be able to:

1. become familiar with the processes involved in volcanic eruptions

2. become familiar with the way eruption types form volcanic cones
3. become familiar with the differences in magma viscosity and how it relates to
eruption explosiveness.

II. Learning Outcomes:

● Attitude: Students will habitually make use of logic and critical reasoning to interpret and
draw inferences from observations, data sets and references.

● Attitude: Students can recognize that Earth's history is recorded and observable by
anyone, in rocks, minerals and fossils.

III. Learning Resources:

Required Learning Resources

● Textbooks.
● Software.
● Relevant reading materials.
● Videos.
● Recordings.

Additional Learning Resources

.IV. Tasks to Complete

● Activities
● Quizzes
● Examination

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V. Content Items

Lesson 1 ; Volcanoes

A volcano is a rupture in the crust of a planetary-mass object, such as Earth, that

allows hot lava, volcanic ash, and gases to escape from a magma chamber below the
surface.
On Earth, volcanoes are most often found where tectonic
plates are diverging or converging, and most are found underwater. For example,
a mid-ocean ridge, such as the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, has volcanoes caused by divergent
tectonic plates whereas the Pacific Ring of Fire has volcanoes caused by convergent
tectonic plates. Volcanoes can also form where there is stretching and thinning of the
crust's plates, such as in the East African Rift and the Wells Gray-Clearwater volcanic
field and Rio Grande rift in North America. Volcanism away from plate boundaries has
been postulated to arise from upwelling diapirs from the core–mantle boundary, 3,000
kilometers (1,900 mi) deep in the Earth. This results in hotspot volcanism, of which
the Hawaiian hotspot is an example. Volcanoes are usually not created where two
tectonic plates slide past one another.

Large eruptions can affect atmospheric temperature as ash and droplets of sulfuric
acid obscure the Sun and cool the Earth's troposphere. Historically, large volcanic
eruptions have been followed by volcanic winters which have caused catastrophic
famines

PLATE TECTONICS

According to the theory of plate tectonics, Earth's lithosphere, its rigid outer shell, is
broken into sixteen larger and several smaller plates. These are in slow motion, due
to convection in the underlying ductile mantle, and most volcanic activity on Earth takes
place along plate boundaries, where plates are converging (and lithosphere is being
destroyed) or are diverging (and new lithosphere is being created).

Divergent plate boundaries

At the mid-ocean ridges, two tectonic plates diverge from one another as hot mantle

rock creeps upwards beneath the thinned oceanic crust. The decrease of pressure in
the rising mantle rock leads to adiabatic expansion and the partial melting of the rock,
causing volcanism and creating new oceanic crust. Most divergent plate boundaries are
at the bottom of the oceans, and so most volcanic activity on the Earth is submarine,
forming new seafloor. Black smokers (also known as deep sea vents) are evidence of
this kind of volcanic activity. Where the mid-oceanic ridge is above sea level, volcanic
islands are formed, such as Iceland.

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Convergent plate boundaries

Subduction zones are places where two plates, usually an oceanic plate and a
continental plate, collide. The oceanic plate subducts (dives beneath the continental
plate), forming a deep ocean trench just offshore. In a process called flux melting,
water released from the subducting plate lowers the melting temperature of the
overlying mantle wedge, thus creating magma. This magma tends to be
extremely viscous because of its high silica content, so it often does not reach the
surface but cools and solidifies at depth. When it does reach the surface, however, a
volcano is formed. Thus subduction zones are bordered by chains of volcanoes
called volcanic arcs. Typical examples are the volcanoes in the Pacific Ring of Fire, such
as the Cascade Volcanoes or the Japanese Archipelago, or the Sunda Arc of Indonesia.

VOLCANIC FEATURES

The most common perception of a volcano is of a conical mountain, spewing lava and

poisonous gases from a crater at its summit; however, this describes just one of the
many types of volcano. The features of volcanoes are much more complicated and their
structure and behavior depends on a number of factors. Some volcanoes have rugged
peaks formed by lava domes rather than a summit crater while others
have landscape features such as massive plateaus. Vents that issue volcanic material
(including lava and ash) and gases (mainly steam and magmatic gases) can develop
anywhere on the landform and may give rise to smaller cones such as Puʻu ʻŌʻō on a
flank of Kīlauea in Hawaii. Other types of volcano include cryovolcanoes (or ice
volcanoes), particularly on some moons of Jupiter, Saturn, and Neptune; and mud
volcanoes, which are formations often not associated with known magmatic activity.
Active mud volcanoes tend to involve temperatures much lower than those
of igneous volcanoes except when the mud volcano is actually a vent of an igneous
volcano.

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Cinder cones

Izalco volcano, the youngest volcano in El Salvador. Izalco erupted almost

continuously from 1770 (when it formed) to 1958, earning it the nickname of
"Lighthouse of the Pacific".

Cinder cones result from eruptions of mostly small pieces

of scoria and pyroclastics (both resemble cinders, hence the name of this volcano type)
that build up around the vent. These can be relatively short-lived eruptions that
produce a cone-shaped hill perhaps 30 to 400 meters (100 to 1,300 ft) high. Most
cinder cones erupt only once. Cinder cones may form as flank vents on larger
volcanoes, or occur on their own. Parícutin in Mexico and Sunset Crater in Arizona are
examples of cinder cones. In New Mexico, Caja del Rio is a volcanic field of over 60
cinder cones.
Based on satellite images, it was suggested that cinder cones might occur on other
terrestrial bodies in the Solar system too; on the surface of Mars and the Moon. [12][13][14]
[15]

Stratovolcanoes (composite volcanoes)

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Cross-section through a stratovolcano 

1. Large magma chamber

2. Bedrock
3. Conduit (pipe)
4. Base
5. Sill
6. Dike
7. Layers of ash emitted by the volcano
8. Flank
9. Layers of lava emitted by the volcano
10.Throat
11.Parasitic cone
12.Lava flow
13.Vent
14.Crater
15.Ash cloud

Stratovolcanoes (composite volcanoes) are tall conical mountains composed of lava

flows and tephra in alternate layers, the strata that gives rise to the name. They are
also known as composite volcanoes because they are created from multiple structures
during different kinds of eruptions. Classic examples include Mount Fuji in Japan, Mayon
Volcano in the Philippines, and Mount Vesuvius and Stromboli in Italy.
Ash produced by the explosive eruption of stratovolcanoes has historically posed the
greatest volcanic hazard to civilizations. The lavas of stratovolcanoes are higher in silica,
and therefore much more viscous, than lavas from shield volcanoes. High-silica lavas
also tend to contain more dissolved gas. The combination is deadly,
promoting explosive eruptions that produce great quantities of ash, as well
as pyroclastic surges like the one that destroyed the city of Saint-Pierre in Martinique in

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1902. They are also steeper than shield volcanoes, with slopes of 30–35° compared to
slopes of generally 5–10°, and their loose tephra are material for dangerous lahars.
[16]
 Large pieces of tephra are called volcanic bombs. Big bombs can measure more than
4 feet (1.2 meters) across and weigh several tons.

ERUPTED MATERIAL

Pāhoehoe lava flow on Hawaii. The picture shows overflows of a main lava channel.

The Stromboli stratovolcano off the coast of Sicily has erupted continuously for

thousands of years, giving rise to its nickname "Lighthouse of the Mediterranean"
The material that is expelled in a volcanic eruption can be classified into three types:
Volcanic gases, a mixture made mostly of steam, carbon dioxide, and a sulfur
compound (either sulfur dioxide, SO2, or hydrogen sulfide, H2S, depending on the
temperature)
Lava, the name of magma when it emerges and flows over the surface
Tephra, particles of solid material of all shapes and sizes ejected and thrown through
the air[29][30]

Volcanic gases

The concentrations of different volcanic gases can vary considerably from one volcano

to the next. Water vapor is typically the most abundant volcanic gas, followed
by carbon dioxide and sulfur dioxide. Other principal volcanic gases include hydrogen
sulfide, hydrogen chloride, and hydrogen fluoride. A large number of minor and trace
gases are also found in volcanic emissions, for example hydrogen, carbon
monoxide, halocarbons, organic compounds, and volatile metal chlorides.

PYROCLASTIC FLOW in a volcanic eruption, a fluidized mixture of

hot rock fragments, hot gases, and entrapped air that moves at high speed in thick,
gray-to-black, turbulent clouds that hug the ground. The temperature of the volcanic
gases can reach about 600 to 700 °C (1,100 to 1,300 °F). The velocity of a flow
often exceeds 100 km (60 miles) per hour and may attain speeds as great as 160 km
(100 miles) per hour. Flows may even travel some distance uphill when they have
sufficient velocity, which they achieve either through the simple effects of gravity or
from the force of a lateral blast out of the side of an exploding volcano. Reaching such
temperatures and velocities, pyroclastic flows can be extremely dangerous. Perhaps the
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most famous flow of this type occurred in 1902 on the French Caribbean island
of Martinique, when a huge nuée ardente (“glowing cloud”) swept down the slopes
of Mount Pelée and incinerated the small port city of Saint-Pierre, killing all but two of
its 29,000 residents.

Pyroclastic flows have their origin in explosive volcanic eruptions, when a violent
expansion of gas shreds escaping magma into small particles, creating what are known
as pyroclastic fragments. (The term pyroclastic derives from the Greek pyro, meaning
“fire,” and clastic, meaning “broken.”) Pyroclastic materials are classified according to
their size, measured in millimetres: dust (less than 0.6 mm [0.02 inch]), ash (fragments
between 0.6 and 2 mm [0.02 to 0.08 inch]), cinders (fragments between 2 and 64 mm
[0.08 and 2.5 inches], also known as lapilli), blocks (angular fragments greater than 64
mm), and bombs (rounded fragments greater than 64 mm). The fluid nature of a
pyroclastic flow is maintained by the turbulence of its internal gases. Both the
incandescent pyroclastic particles and the rolling clouds of dust that rise above them
actively liberate more gas. The expansion of these gases accounts for the nearly
frictionless character of the flow as well as its great mobility and destructive power.

Lesson 2 : Geologic Deep Time

Deep time is a term introduced and applied by John McPhee to the concept of geologic
time in his Basin and Range (1981), parts of which originally appeared in the New
Yorker magazine.
The philosophical concept of geological time was developed in the 18th century
by Scottish geologist James Hutton (1726–1797);[2][3] his "system of the habitable Earth"
was a deistic mechanism keeping the world eternally suitable for humans. The modern
concept entails huge changes over the age of the Earth which has been determined to
be, after a long and complex history of developments, around 4.55 billion years.

Hutton based his view of deep time on a form of geochemistry that had developed in
Scotland and Scandinavia from the 1750s onward. [6] As mathematician John Playfair,
one of Hutton's friends and colleagues in the Scottish Enlightenment, remarked upon
seeing the strata of the angular unconformity at Siccar Point with Hutton and James
Hall in June 1788, "the mind seemed to grow giddy by looking so far into the abyss of
time".
Early geologists such as Nicolas Steno (1638–1686) and Horace-Bénédict de
Saussure (1740–1799) had developed ideas of geological strata forming from water
through chemical processes, which Abraham Gottlob Werner (1749–1817) developed
into a theory known as Neptunism, envisaging the slow crystallisation of minerals in the
ancient oceans of the Earth to form rock. Hutton's innovative 1785 theory, based
on Plutonism, visualised an endless cyclical process of rocks forming under the sea,
being uplifted and tilted, then eroded to form new strata under the sea. In 1788 the
sight of Hutton's Unconformity at Siccar Point convinced Playfair and Hall of this
extremely slow cycle, and in that same year Hutton memorably wrote "we find no
vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end".

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Other scientists such as Georges Cuvier (1769–1832) put forward ideas of past ages,
and geologists such as Adam Sedgwick (1785–1873) incorporated Werner's ideas into
concepts of catastrophism; Sedgwick inspired his university student Charles Darwin to
exclaim "What a capital hand is Sedgewick [sic] for drawing large cheques upon the
Bank of Time!". In a competing theory, Charles Lyell in his Principles of Geology (1830–
1833) developed Hutton's comprehension of endless deep time as a
crucial scientific concept into uniformitarianism. As a young naturalist and geological
theorist, Darwin studied the successive volumes of Lyell's book exhaustively during
the Beagle survey voyage in the 1830s, before beginning to theorise about evolution.
Physicist Gregory Benford addresses the concept in Deep Time: How Humanity
Communicates Across Millennia  (1999), as does paleontologist and Nature editor Henry
Gee in In Search of Deep Time: Beyond the Fossil Record to a New History of
Life (2001)[12][13] Stephen Jay Gould's Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle (1987) also deals in
large part with the evolution of the concept.

Essential Concepts

There are 5 main concept with which students struggle when thinking about Deep Time
The concept that earth has a multi-billion year history.
1. imagining or comprehending big numbers,
2. the difference between relative and numerical age,
3. the concept of "timescales",
4. the ways we know about the age of the Earth and other materials, and
5. resolving perceived issues with religious beliefs

The geologic timescale

With the discovery of radioactivity, geologists (like Bertram Boltwood at right) could use
minerals in rocks to discover the age of crystallization. Many began work to put
numbers on the geologic time scale. Ironically, most fossils cannot be dated using
methods that involve radioactive decay. However, the occurrence of pyroclastic volcanic
deposits interbedded with and igneous rocks that cross cut sedimentary rocks allows us
to bracket the ages of rocks that contain important fossils. When we do that, we
discover that the "scale" of the geologic column based on fossils gets stretched out -
the Precambrian (a section the same size as the Cambrian period above) appears as
about 87% of the time scale and all the detail of the Paleo-, Meso- and Cenozoic are
mashed into 13% of the scale!

VI. Summary:
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 1. How do you teach students about volcanoes?
2. Why is it important to learn about volcanoes?
3. What do children learn from volcanoes?
4. Why is deep time important?
5. What did you learn about volcanoes?

VII. Review Question:

1. What are the 4 major divisions of geologic time?

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2. What are some of its characteristics of geologic time scale?

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3. What are the methods used to determine geologic time?

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4. What are the 3 main volcanoes?

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5. What are 4 famous volcanoes?

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6. Why was the concept of deep time important for the development of evolutionary
thinking?
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7. Why is it important to study and monitor volcanoes?

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8. Who discovered geologic time?

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9. What causes volcanoes?

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10. What is geologic time scale?

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