GENERAL SYLLABUS
INTRODUCTION TO MARINE GEOLOGY
MGG 501 Fall 2006

INTRODUCTION TO MARINE GEOLOGY
General Information (April, 2006; subject to revision, especially
if lectures are delayed by hurricanes as, lately, they have been)

Instructor: James Natland
Professor, Marine Geology and Geophysics
Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science (RSMAS),
University of Miami
RSMAS North Grosvenor 269;
Phone: (305) 361-4123 (X54123 with campus phones); jnatland@rsmas.miami.edu
Home (305)361-1819; jnatland@msn.com /p>

BS Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Earth Sciences
PhD University of California, San Diego, Earth Sciences

Igneous petrology, Mineralogy, Geochemistry, Volcanology, Marine Geology

Lectures in MGG 501 will be hourly, twice a week, Monday and Wednesday, 9:00 A.M. in this room unless we decide to do something different.  Two of the hours will be laboratory sessions devoted to rocks and minerals.

The course will cover a great deal of diverse material.  This is the nature of the subject.  There is no single text that presents the material in a way that I consider satisfactory, so reading will be from chapters of several texts, and from reprints of the literature that I shall place in the library.

The material will be presented mainly using PowerPoint presentations, with some late-breaking overheads and slides.  The PowerPoint material will be available on Blackboard, and distributed on CD's prior to exams.

There will be three general assignments: 1) a geographical exercise; 2) review a popular book, more or less of your choice, on a general geological topic; 3) compilation of an annotated bibliography on a marine-geological subject of interest to you which we shall negotiate.  I'll provide the list.  The first exercise is mainly for fun, and will only count if you don't do it.

There will be two one-hour exams, the first in October, the second during finals week, with the date and time to be arranged, depending on the rest of your exam schedules.  The grade will be based on the book review (20%), the annotated bibliography (30%), the mid-term (20%) and the final (30%).

The topics listed below will be taken up more or less in the order given.  They do not necessarily conform to individual lectures.  View this as a living document, subject to change.

FIRST OF ALL, WHAT ARE WE TALKING ABOUT?

  1. WHY ON EARTH ARE THERE OCEAN BASINS?
    1. Introductory Cosmology: H2O in the Solar System
    2. General features of continents and ocean basins
    3. A short side trip.  Were there oceans on Mars?
    4. Rocks and minerals (two lab sessions and lectures)
      1. All about silicates in one easy lesson
      2. Rocks: The Big Four - basalt, granite, andesite, and peridotite
      3. Laboratory Sessions: two dealing with hand-specimen identification of rocks and minerals
    5. Geography Lesson: FIRST ASSIGNMENT
      1. Places you should know in the briney deep
    6. What's active?
      1. Plate boundaries; rudiments of plate tectonics (what are plates?  Plate motions and rates)
      2. Volcanoes: A primer on volcanology
        1. arcs, explosive volcanism, volcanic hazards and human evolution
        2. hot spots: modern controversy
        3. spreading ridges
        4. relationship to plate motions
      3. Distribution of earthquakes
      4. Mountain belts
      5. Trenches
    7. What's not?
      1. Cratons
      2. Ancient mountain belts
      3. Abyssal plains
    8. Age distribution of surface features
    9. Structure of the Earth
      1. Core, mantle, magnetic field
      2. Continental crust
      3. Ocean crust

Next: How to think about the Earth: take a long view

  1. Early history of the Earth
    1. Origin of the atmosphere and sea water - changes through time
    2. Age of the Earth/Geological Time
    3. Reconstructing the past
    4. Development of life and evolution of organisms - the geologic record
  2. Early views of the Earth
    1. Development of Geological Sciences
    2. Strata, fossils, volcanoes
    3. Werner, Hutton, Lyell, Darwin, Dana - a progression
    4. Exploration of the Pacific

  3. Geological doctrines
    1. Catastrophism versus uniformitarianism
    2. Stability of continents and ocean basins
    3. Davis Cycle
    4. Geosynclines
    5. Continental drift and seafloor spreading
  4. A brief history of Geological Time - from the Bible to orbital tuning
  5. Interlude: a Snowball Earth?

Crust-Mantle Interactions

  1. Principles of Plate Tectonics
    1. Rises, trenches, great faults, and crustal blocks
    2. Transform faults and earthquakes
    3. Magnetic anomalies
    4. Paving-stone hypothesis
    5. Euler's theorem
    6. Debate about hot spots, plumes, and mantle convection
    7. Restructuring the ocean floor: propagating rifts
  2. The face of the deep (refer back to geographical exercise)
    1. General features of ocean basins
      1. rises, ridges, and hot springs
      2. ridges and hot spots
      3. aseismic ridges and basins
      4. ridge segmentation
      5. fracture zones and transform faults
      6. atolls and guyots
      7. plateaus
      8. arcs and backarc basins

 Interactions between the atmosphere, land surfaces, and the oceans

  1. Sedimentation in the oceans
    1. Plate stratigraphy
      1. 1) Productivity belts
      2. 2) The CCD and lysocline
      3. 3) Pelagic clay
    2. The spoilage of continents
      1. River systems and deltas
      2. Continental margins
      3. Submarine canyons
      4. Aprons and abyssal plains
      5. Sediment drifts and bottom currents
    3. Influence of sea level
      1. Causes of sea-level fluctuation
        1. Ice Volume
        2. Mantle Convection
      2. Sequence stratigraphy
    4. Volcanogenic sedimentation
      1. Flow of pyroclastic material into the sea
      2. Erosion of islands
      3. Coral reefs
      4. Archipelagic aprons
    5. High-resolution stratigraphy
    6. Hydrothermal deposits
      1. At ridges
      2. Red Sea
      3. Hydrothermally-induced currents
  2. Sedimentations in ancient ocean basins
    1. Using plate stratigraphy
    2. Fluctuating CCD's and lysocline
    3. Sequence of continental margin development in the Atlantic: fresh water lakes, evaporites, anoxia, oxygenation
    4. Oxygen minimum and rapid sediment accumulation versus stagnation
    5. History of guyots
    6. Asteroids, dinosaurs, and the geological record: Catastrophism rejuvenated
  3. Where does it all go? Subduction, accretionary wedges, metamorphic belts, and mountain systems

Special Topic

  1. The development of the Theory of Evolution out of Geology

Conclusion: Viewing the Earth as a whole

  1. The Wilson cycle
    1. Chemical geodynamics
    2. Mantle reservoirs
    3. Geochemical mass balances at subduction zones
    4. Influence of Cretaceous megaplumes on sea level, mountain belts, atmospheres, and oceans.

Reading: required chapters from:

Holmes, Arthur, 1965.  Principles of Physical Geology: New York (The Ronald Press Co.)

Kennett, James, 1982.  Marine Geology, Englewood Cliffs, N.J. (Prentic-Hall, Inc.)

Cox, Allan (ed.) 1973.  Plate Teactonics and Geomagnetic Reversals, San Francisco (W.H. Freeman & Co)

Bird, J.M., Isacks, B. (Eds), 19??.  Plate Tectonics: Selected Papers from the Journal of Geophysical Research

Emiliani, C., 1992.  Planet Earth: Cosmology, Geology, and the Evolution of Life and Environment: Cambridge (Cambridge University Press)

Selections from the literature to be on reserve in the library.

Suggested reading from:

Wegener, A., 1928.  The Origin of Continents and Oceans (Dover reprint, 1966).

Menard, H.W., 1986.  The Ocean of Truth