EOSC 453 ADVANCED PHYSICS OF THE EARTH

EOSC 453 PHYSICS OF THE EARTH AND PLANETS 2011

Instructor: Mark Jellinek (mjellinek@eos.ubc.ca)

TA: Reka Winslow (rwinslow@eos.ubc.ca)

COURSE OUTLINE

I. Introduction

``Physics of the Earth and planets'' is a very large subject. To provide a little perspective on the breadth and richness implicit in the title of this course, the annual American Geophysical Union meeting last December involved almost 20,000 presentations! So-called ``cutting edge'' research topics included classes of problems emerging in studies of climate change on short-, intermediate-, and long-time scales, atmosphere-ocean coupling, earthquake hydrology, volcano seismology, volcanic eruption dynamics and flows, continental cratons, plate boundary dynamics, tectonic geomorphology, erosion and sedimentation, the growth, evolution and differentiation of terrestrial and giant planets, the origin and thermal history of icy satellites, and planetary magnetic fields (and much more!). By next year the number of presentations is expected to increase by 10% or more and the main research foci may be very different.... Science moves and evolves very quickly indeed.

The possibility to explore such a wonderful variety of research directions is what makes studies of the Physics of the Earth and planets fun and rewarding. In addition, sufficiently little is understood about our and other planets that the opportunity for discovery remains very real and is thus inspiring. For this reason core issues addressed by the geophysics community change and evolve in real time. EOSC 453 is a capstone course in the honors Geophysics program and is aimed at introducing you to topical issues in this field as well as to problem solving strategies for building understanding of these issues. This is a fun course! As a marked departure from many of your previous courses there will be no assigned textbook and the course content will be based on selected readings from the current research literature and a series of MATLAB-based assignments. This year's readings will be chosen by you from the reading list on the course website (see link below, section VII). All of the papers are recent review papers (mostly the last 5-10 years) drawn principally from Reviews in Geophysics and the Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Science, the two leading review journals in geophysics. In contrast to original research publications review papers have a much broader scope and are designed to put the given problem into a timely context.

II. Teams and not….

Review Papers: The class will be divided into three person teams formed on the basis of common interests with regard to the review papers. Where possible each team will include some combination of 4^th year honors geophysics/combined honors student and one or more students from another program. To work through the papers teams will, in turn, play three roles each week: a) Presenters (two groups of 3); b) Discussants (two groups of 3); and c) Audience (see section III for details).

MATLAB Assignments: You will also work either alone or in two-person teams to complete 4 or 5 MATLAB-based assignments and accompanying reports.

For team assignments please see the link below in section VII.

III. Weekly presentations: Team roles, goals and work to be distributed or turned in

Presenters. The presenters will be responsible for choosing a paper from the reading list that will be the subject of a week-long focus of the class. The two groups of three folks are responsible for TWO presentations:

Tuesdays: A 45-60 minute informal presentation AND discussion of the background material necessary to understand the essential concepts of the assigned paper. This will require significant additional research (Google, textbooks, the open literature etc.). You may use powerpoint or the blackboard.

Wednesday eve: A 30-40 minute formal powerpoint presentation of the paper itself followed by a discussion that historically lasts for an hour or longer (it need not last this long but it usually does). Your presentations will be posted on the course website where it can be used as an instructional resource for other members of the class. You are limited to a maximum of 20 slides in addition to a title, talk outline and summary. YOU WILL HAVE TO PRACTICE in order to satisfy both the time and slide number limits.

· You will submit via email to me AND TO Reka Winslow (course TA) electronic copies of each presentation by the THURSDAY following your last talks. PLEASE NOTE THAT I ACCEPT NO LATE WORK! This is repeated below.

Discussants. Following the formal Thursday presentation these two groups will lead a critical discussion of the paper and presentation. As there are two explicit groups of three I expect you to focus on different issues or concepts. The content of the discussion is up to the discussants but might include a criticism of the paper itself, questions directed to the presenters or the introduction of new material. It is the job of the discussants to be critical and the job of the presenters to defend the paper and themselves against the criticism.

· EACH GROUP OF Discussants will submit an outline of at least 5 core issues/questions they intend to raise to each member of the audience (below) and to the instructor at or before the start of Thursday’s class (by email the night before is fine, otherwise on paper in class).

· Please submit your questions to me and to Reka Winslow for comments.

Audience. Members of the audience are expected to engage in all discussion. They must be knowledgeable about the presented work and be ready to pose questions to both the presenters and the discussants.

For BOTH Tuesday’s and Thursday’s class, each audience member will compile at least three questions about the paper for the week (that’s two sets of three or more questions). Each audience member will distribute their questions to the audience, the discussants and the instructor at the start of class. More about the nature of the questions during the first week of class.

Feedback. Following the formal presentation and discussion on Wednesday we will discuss as a class the substance and style of both talks. The point is to provide the presenters with candid but constructive feedback.

Each audience member and each discussant will provide by email some written comments about the presentations to the presenters, ccd to the instructor.

I will try to track how these comments are incorporated into subsequent talks as the semester progresses.

Goals of the presentations. One philosophical and one practical:

Pedagogical: A critical part of your scientific education is to be able to understand, evaluate and discuss intelligently and openly scientific work. It is particularly important to learn to assimilate, reduce and present clearly concepts that can be well outside your expertise or experience. This is part of learning to think clearly, or to “get to the bottom” of things. This process is also a critical step in identifying knowledge gaps and defining new problems.

Practical:

a) Learning. The interactions among the presenters, discussants and audience are intended to provide a thorough exploration of the assigned topic. The process of constructing either the presentation or the discussion will help students learn how to learn.

b) Improved presentation effectiveness. Following the presentation and discussion we will have an open discussion and analysis of the detailed mechanics of the presentation. The outline of the talk, precision and clarity of language, presence, style, use of powerpoint, etc. will all be discussed. The goal is to improve future presentations.

IV. MATLAB assignments and reports

The MATLAB-based projects have the following goals:

a) Work quantitatively with concepts arising in or related to the readings. This is an important part of learning to build understanding and also learning about what the point is of mathematical modeling.

b) Gain familiarity with MATLAB problem solving

c) Gain a little experience with computational physics

d) Gain experience with the written presentation of technical material

Assignments will have two parts:

a) A report of the results that is precisely and carefully written. Your report should have 4 parts:

1. An introduction that motivates and defines explicitly both the “real” problem and the model problem that you will solve. In this section make clear: what you are doing, how you are doing it, why you are doing it and in what order your work will proceed. Explicitly indicate the question(s) that you are asking in your work.

2. A methodical presentation of your results that is constructed figure by figure. In this section there should be no discussion or speculation—just discuss what the figures show. There should be no discussion, for example, of why something occurs either numerically or scientifically.

3. A discussion section in which you discuss the results and speculate on their meaning. Also discuss what your model captures and misses related to the “real” problem that is motivating the work. Here you can also expand on any issues related to numerical and analytical methods, data analysis etc. that were particularly successful or troubling.

4. Concluding remarks and directions for future work. In this section give the conclusions that follow from your results. This section must be free of speculation. Finish off with some comments on directions for future investigation. If your model must be augmented in some way to take the next step, discuss briefly how.

b) A hard copy and an electronic copy of your MATLAB codes by email to the instructor and the TA.

Some assignments will be discussed openly in class on the Wenesday of the week in which they are due. In some cases I will ask a group to present what they did and discuss what they have learned. Where it is useful we will discuss presentation and coding styles.

V. Final Exam

An oral final exam will be based on assigned readings and the related background and context material. The exam will stress qualitative concepts encountered throughout the course and will not involve problem solving. You will be expected to know the main results and conclusions of each paper.

VI. Approximate basis for assessment

Presentations (3), discussions and submitted questions 60%

MATLAB assignments 40%

=> Please note that NO LATE WORK WILL BE ACCEPTED. Read that twice. Now read it again. <=

VII. Assignments, information and downloads

Reading List (I had to take down the links to the PDFs because of the new UBC copyright disease)

Presentation schedule (“Author” corresponds to authors in the “Reading List”)

Numerical Computing with MATLAB (an online textbook)

REQUIRED READING: Notes on the numerical solution of differential equations [PDF]

MATLAB script ODEexample1main.m

MATLAB script ODEexample2main.m

MATLAB function func_rk4.m