An excellent Internet educational tool has been developed to step students through the process of locating the epicenter of an earthquake and determining its magnitude on the Richter scale. This interactive “Virtual Earthquake” activity is part of a series of “Geology Labs On-Line.” These labs were designed by Gary A. Novak of the California University at Los Angeles and supported by grants from the US National Science Foundation and the California State University System.
Objective: interpret graphical data (three seismograms per earthquake) to allow the Virtual Earthquake program to calculate the earthquake’s epicenter and magnitude. The program will prompt you to measure values again (e.g. S-P interval) if they are not close enough to the actual values.
The learning module nicely steps us through the analysis and completes the calculations.
$ Go to this link:
http://nemo.sciencecourseware.org/VirtualEarthquake/
Choose: “Execute VirtualEarthquake”
$ Choose one of the four options for generating an earthquake:
“ “ D-H Southern California
Which earthquake region did you choose? _______________________
The program will generate a Virtual Seismologist Certificate of Completion when you finish the exercise. It also creates a table of data that compares your results to the actual data from the real earthquake you analyzed.
I Print the table of date and the “certificate” to turn in for grade
