Geology 102: Our Dynamic Earth

Welcome to Our Dynamic Earth!  I am Daniel Karner, and I am an Associate Professor in the Sonoma State Geology Department.  Read about my teaching philosophy.  Here is my scientific background and a list of my publications.

NEW POSTINGS!!!

12-02-2007 (11:25 P.M.): I have posted the viewgraphs through Lecture 25. The final review sheet is posted below.

MIDTERM 1 REVIEW (posted on 9/18)

MIDTERM 2 REVIEW (posted on 10-30)

FINAL EXAM REVIEW (posted on 12/03)

I will be building this website as the semester goes along, and so I will ask you all to check in periodically for announcements and updates about the class.  I also have posted all of the pertinent information that you will need to find me, and the Geology 102 course syllabus (i.e. the riot act) . Here is the 102 schedule ,which includes the reading schedule, lecture topics, exam dates, and hyperlinks to my personal lecture notes and the PowerPoint images shown in class. My goal will be to post the lecture notes the week before I give the lecture, and then truncate what I actually covered the following weekend.

I am very excited about teaching this course!  I hope to make this class interesting and fun for you all, regardless of your educational backgrounds or career interests.  I recognize that SOME of you may not actually want to become geologists.  That's okay.  I know that all of your lives are affected by geology, and so I hope to craft this course so that it teaches you what you need to know about the world around you.  It is my hope that this course will help you to develop an intuitive sense for how the world operates, and how we fit into it.

This photograph of Earth, taken during the Apollo 17 mission to the Moon, shows much of what we will talk about during this course- oceans, climate change- from the blistering deserts of Northern Africa to glacial Antarctica, the splitting of continents by plate tectonics (see Red Sea between Africa and Arabian Peninsula), mineral resources, such as oil in the Middle East, gold and diamonds in South Africa, and the billions of years of time that have been needed to make our planet.