I. The limitations of Web search engines.

Depending on the engine, it may pull up many sites, few sites, totally unrelated sites, or maybe even what you are looking for. See what you get when you try various popular web browsers.

Go to the UD Mineralogy and Petrology research on the Web. Click on "Basic Resources". Try searching on geochemistry or another keyword in the three search engines Alta Vista, Yahoo, and Google.

1. On a separate piece of paper, write down your notes or impressions on: which keywords worked best, did the search find useful sites or lots of unrelated sites, etc. Also: Given a list of "hits", how many/how much time will you allot to investigate those sites of interest.

II. WWW guides

It is for this reason that professors do well to provide useful links to their students. It is also true that pages that may be little more than a list of links (such as the Mineralogy and Petrology research on the Web page) can be useful to scientists and students.

2. Investigate a site or two under each category of the Mineralogy and Petrology research on the Web page. Write down the title of the site and briefly what the page includes.

3. Go to the Geochemistry on the World Wide web page (based at Cornell). Explore this site and write a few sentences about the usefulness (if any) of this page.

III. Web References

There are a number of educational or tutorial sites on the Web. There are many for introductory geology. There are also sites for volcanoes and dinosaurs and other 'hot' topics. Since Geochemistry is an advanced course there are less educational sites aimed for a college upperclassperson (as opposed to middle school or first-year). One example might be the USGS site Understanding Our Planet Through Chemistry" (link is on the 412 syllabus page.)

There are great resources on the web however Ð some have hot links on the GEO 412 course web page. Some we have explored in lab Ð for example, 14C dating. We will look at one more.

Webelements (professional edition) and
http://www.webelements.com/webelements/scholar/index.html (scholar edition) A quick and handy reference.

Chart of the Nuclides http://atom.kaeri.re.kr/

Click on the lowest section of the graphic that comes up. You should see the Chart of the Nuclides from H on up.

5. What is the color coding of this chart?
Blue red salmon fuschia yellow green cyan blue gray

6. Click on the 14C box. What is the listed half-life? What type of decay occurs for this element?

7. Why can't 11C or 15C be used for age-dating?

Go to a higher part of this chart. Find uranium. 8. Which isotopes are naturally occurring? Which are stable(No decay at all)?

9. What is the half life of 234U? 235U? 238U?

On-line databases

Geokem http://www.geokem.com/. With its introductory and explanatory material, this may be the most useful site for undergraduates.

10. Georock http://georoc.mpch-mainz.gwdg.de/georoc/ Click on geological setting. What kinds of settings are listed? What kinds of rock (igneous, sedimentary, metamorphic) would you find here? Why these settings?

11.Click on petrography. Here samples are subdivisions of _________ rocks. Do you think a review of the petrography of igneous rocks is in order?

12. PetDB http://www.petdb.org/ What is included in this database?

Tables of numbers are not that useful in themselves. Click on tools on menu at the left. What is petroplot?

Sample data sets to play with are found by clicking on Download options, them on ready-to-use data.

IV. Downloading Useful Scientific Software

The resources on the web are many. Some you have already found, I am sure. Resources I will show you today are: free commercial applications (Netscape, etc), Free or shareware general purpose applications (graphing programs, etc), and specific geochemistry related sites, for thermodynamic applications, or water chemistry applications.

Free commercial applications

Such as; Internet Explorer, Netscape, Adobe Acrobat Reader, Alladin applications. Some of these are platform Ð specific. Be sure to download the proper version for your computer!!!!!

Free or shareware general purpose applications

http://www.tudogs.com and www.tucows.com are worth exploring, when you have time. Some neat applications.

As scientists you would do well to find:

A graphics/image program (for those of us that don't have Photoshop)

Look under Image viewers and Image editors. One I highly recommend is nih-image, which can be gotten at their website: http://rsb.info.nih.gov/nih-image/

Best of all, it's FREE.

A graphing program (for those of us who are tired of Excel graphs) Gnuplot General information page: http://www.gnuplot.info/ Introduction to GnuPlot by College of Natural Sciences Computing Laboratories, University of Northern Iowa http://www.cs.uni.edu/Help/gnuplot/

Geochemistry Programs

A useful page to start perusing is Terry Gordon's links to Thermodynamic software: http://ichor.geo.ucalgary.ca/~tmg/Research/thermo_links.html.

USGS Water Resources Applications Software: http://water.usgs.gov/software/geochemical.html

13. What are some software programs available through this site? What kinds of parameters can they calculate or model - list some examples.

Aqueous geochemistry: PHREEQC (Version 2) homepage is: http://wwwbrr.cr.usgs.gov/projects/GWC_coupled/phreeqc/ Download now!

WEB-PHREEQ: AQUEOUS GEOCHEMICAL MODELING http://www.ndsu.nodak.edu/webphreeq/ Bookmark it! We will use this site in later labs.

Last updated: Jan. 10, 2006

Dr. Koziol's homepage

GEO 412 syllabus The graphics on this page are courtesy of Jelane's free web graphics