FINAL PROJECT
Spring 2011

IMPORTANT!  End-of-semester course evaluation will posted in the 'quiz' section of the My Blackboard home page.  I will not have access to this except to see who completes the survey.  Results are sent to my Chair about 2 weeks after the semester ends, and he sends them to me.  Responses remain confidential, I never see any clues identifying participants unless your writing style is distinctive, and even then I have better things to do and more interesting mysteries to solve.

You have just been hired as the Assistant Environmental Attaché for the United States Embassy in a country that has experienced serious earthquakes in the past.  Each of you has been assigned to a different embassy.

Summer assignments for international environmental internships (we can dream, can't we?):

OK, some of these places are not popular vacation locations, but adventure is adventure and a job is a job.

The new ambassador (your boss) wants a report summarizing the earthquake risk of the country or region.  You have one week to conduct the research and summarize your results in a PowerPoint presentation.  Your PowerPoint show should speak for itself - it should require a minimum of oral explanation although you are free to include sounds (I use Audacity and my microphone to embed short sound bytes into some slides).  This information will be used to educate Americans moving to the nation of your internship.

You have used the global earthquake catalog in previous projects.  If you lost the files you may go back and reconstruct the database.

You need to summarize at least 2 kinds of information: (1) significant historical events, and (2) frequency-magnitude patterns based on the short-term record, and what these patterns suggest.  Free free to include relevant geology (locations and kinds of plate boundaries or notorious faults, for example) but assume that the ambassador was a surgeon and probably knows very little about geology so include a short explanation on why these features are important.

Example of frequency-magnitude pattern, global earthquakes

Your PowerPoint show should be interesting enough to hold the interest of the audience without distracting from the content.  Keep any audio clips in good taste (no applause, please) and professional.  Your show should require no more than 7 - 10 minutes to view and read, should include a title slide and a bibliography as the final slide.  Use appropriate animations and backgrounds.  This show might be shown to legislators and executives of the nation or region, so please show proper respect and sensitivity to your host country.

You have used the earthquake catalog database in previous assignments and, for those of you who were unsure of how to handle the earthquake statistics and their interpretation, I have posted an example available through the link above.

If you are having problems with the database and/or text file you need to import into ArcView, bring a thumb drive to my office and I will copy the file to your drive.  Call or email first to make sure I am in the office.  I will dimly view this sort of request next Monday or Tuesday morning.

You will, of course, need a map showing earthquake epicenters (with emphasis on earthquakes magnitude 6 and above, earthquakes capable of flattening a major city if they hit in just the wrong place) and another showing earthquake depths.  A map showing major cities (along with earthquake locations) might be useful (is there a "cities" theme somewhere among the ESRI data files?).  If photos, paintings or artist sketches from serious historical earthquakes are found, one or two might remind the viewers of just what earthquakes can do.  Remember, you can use Adobe Illustrator is add elements to a map image.  A map showing major faults might also prove useful - if you copy a map from a Web site, please give credit for the source, and use Illustrator to add information you think relevant.

How frequently do earthquakes over 6.0; over 6.5; over 7.0; over 7.5; over 8.0 hit in the region you are analyzing?  Summarize your results in a Table near the conclusion of your show.  Remember that earthquakes of magnitude 7.5 can do serious damage even if their epicenters are 50 km away, and a magnitude 8 can break a fault 250 km long, so epicenters near your nation might indicate a threat.  I will not be overly critical of your choice of distance so long as you recognize this fact somehow and somehow include those earthquakes in your analysis.

Critical thinking: does the short-term record (earthquake catalog beginning in 1973) more or less predict the historical record?  The ambassador wants your opinion (backed by logical arguments) on this issue.  Does it appear that the short-term record predicts (too few, just about the right number of, too many) of the big earthquakes than have occurred historically?  Explain briefly.

Please include a slide summarizing resources you accessed to get your answers.

The Ambassador needs your completed product by Noon, Tuesday, 3, 2011.  Please attach your PowerPoint project to a message and submit it to the Blackboard Messages by 11:59 AM on that date, and I will forward it to His Excellency, the Ambassador.

Suggested organization:

Title Slide (include "Prepared by" and date)
Statement of the Problem
Historical earthquakes (several slides: map, damage images, table?)
Nation's relationship to plate tectonics, along with brief explanation relating tectonic plate motions to earthquakes
Short-term catalog epicenters and analysis (this will take several sides)
Table showing 'how frequently' numbers
Discussion on short-term vs. historical seismicity
Bibliography (note that the earthquake catalog was obtained from the National Earthquake Information Center - google NEIC to check it out and get the full URL).

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