Help Questions – Final Exam

FINAL PROJECT: To give you some flexibility, I have set the final exam as a "final project" which is due at the end of the period in which the course final exam is scheduled (Saturday from 2-5). Instructions for its completion will be included when the take-home "project" is given to you. The exam/final project will be ready on Friday morning (I will let you know if I get it done earlier). It is due in my mailbox in Carnegie at 5:00 on Saturday; I will be in my office between 2 and 5 which is the scheduled exam time. You are welcome to complete the exercise at that timel I can set you up in a quiet space in the department. I will make a last check at 5:00 and will log in all submissions. Late submissions must be turned into Dean Sayles..... and she will probably not accept them.

HELP SESSIONS: I will hold a help session in the main lab (Carnegie 212) at 6:00 PM on Thursday. I will also be in my office for much of Friday.

STUDY QUESTIONS:

To make this a more all-inclusing set of questions, I have simply combined the questions for the first two exams and added some to cover the time since the second exam plus labs. As before, use these to guide you in the right directions and not as a presumed "question bank" from which I might choose questions. Also, keep in mind that I will be asking more overarching questions that try to tie principles together rather than dealing with more specific, single topics as was the case in the first two exams. There will probably be at least one essay on the final, but I usually give choices.

First Exam Study Questions:

1. What can we tell from the size and sorting of a sediment or sedimentary rock?

2. What is the relationship between wave energy and grain size?

3. Explain the change in beach slope as grain size increases.

4. Describe the changes that occur in wavelength, wave speed (celerity) and wave height as a wave moves into shallower water. What is going on?

5. Why do waves refract.

6. What is transgression? Regression? How do they relate to sea-level change and sediment supply?

7. Under stable sea level, is an eroding beach transgressive or regressive? How about a sinking island off the Mississippi River?

8. Using the Hjulstrom diagram:
At what current speed would sand that is 1-mm in diameter start to erode?
How about 2-mm sand?
How about 30 mm mud?
Explain the pattern you predicted.

9. What factors will affect whether a shoreline is transgressive or regressive?

10. Compare and contrast the nature of the coastal deposits on the east versus west coast of the US. What is controlling the difference? (and similar questions about other coastlines)

11. What factors should a good coastal classification consider?

12. What is the origin of the Gulf of Suez? What would the coast look like? What would them main sedimentary constituents be?

13. What is the difference between the trailing edger coastline along the eastern US and western Africa? What factor(s) is/are responsible?

14. Describe how a wave forms and what happens to it as it moves ahead of the storm.

15. What factors will control how big a wave is?

16. Compare the effects of higher versus longer waves as they move onto the beach.

17. Why do we have tides?

18. What is the difference between a spring tide and a neap tide? What controls the difference?

19. What is the amphidromic system? How to tidal range and timing vary around it?

20. Why do tidal currents flow?

21. What happens to the tidal current as we increase tidal range? What will happen to the inlet in response?

22. What is the relationship between the “ocean tide” and the “lagoon tide? What is going on?

23. Why are barrier islands usually sandy? What is their dominant mineralogy (usually)? Why?

24. What is the relationship between wave type (spilling, plunging, surging) and beach slope?

25. Describe the recovery cycle on a beach after a storm. What will the resulting beds inside the beach look like after a complete “repair”?

26. Discuss the different ways in which people have proposed that barrier islands have formed.

27. Discuss the origin and controls of barrier islands during the last sea-level rise.

28. What is “Walther’s Law” and how does it relate to our ability to use environments exposed on the Earth’s surface to the related sedimentary facies that exist beneath?

29. What is the relationship between depositional environments and sedimentary facies.

Second Exam Study Questions

1. What is a tidal inlet? How do they form?

2. What are the main parts of a flood- and ebb-tidal delta? What are the main flow paths over and around them? What sorts of bedforms and paleo-current directions are characteristic of the two?

3. I wouldn’t be surprised to see a map or air photo of an estuary and a question that involves telling me what sorts of sediments, bedforms and transport directions occur where? Or what sorts of sedimentary rocks they might form?

4. Why do we get tidal currents? What is the relationship between the ocean elevation and the lagoon tide as water rises and falls in the ocean? How does this relate to currents in the main tidal channel through the barrier-island trend?

5. Why does the main channel through the barriers “breath” as we go from spring tides to neap tides and back?

6. What is the difference between a ripple, a megaripple and a sand wave?

7. Why are the bedforms in the main ebb channel so large? What is their net direction of movement? What sort (and direction) of cross beds does this form? Why are these bedforms oriented in the direction they are?

8. Why does a flood-tidal delta look so much like a sheep with droopy ears (or maybe a trilobite with long arms) when viewed from the air?

9. How do tidal inlets and their associated sand bodies change with increasing tide, lower wave action, or both? Why?

10. How does all that sand moving down the coast get past tidal inlets?

11. Why put jetties in an inlet?

12. Why are inlets generally bad places to put hotels?

13. How does changing inlet type affect stability of the shoreline on either side (wave- versus tide-dominated)?

14. How do flood- and ebb-tidal deltas change as we go from a wave- to a tide-dominated system?

15. Where would you expect to see wave-versus tide-dominated tidal inlets between Cape Hatteras and Cape Canaveral?

16. How do coastal sand bodies change as you go from a microtidal area top a macrotidal area? Why?

17. What is the distinction of a coastal classification based on microtidal versus macrotidal differ from one based on wave versus tide dominance?

18. What characteristics would you look for in the fossil record to identify coastal sand dunes?

19. How do coastal dunes form?

20. What is the relationship between coastal dunes and sea level?

21. What is the role of sand dunes along the coast? How do they relate to the erodability of a stretch of coastline?

22. What development practices relative to dunes might increase the erodability of a beach?

23. Describe what Francis Shepard used to call the Summer-Winter Beach Cycle.

24. What will determine where a nearshore bar will form as sand is eroded off the beach?

25. Describe the process of beach recovery after a storm passes.

26. What is a ridge-and-runnel system and how does it relate to all of this?

27. Sketch the sedimentary structures associated with a beach in cross section after storm recovery.

28. How will the changes in a wave- versus tide-dominate beach/inlet system relate to the preservability of barrier-island-related features in the rock record?

29. Make sure you are comfortable with those pesky transgression and regression diagrams. Think about how the preserved facies might change during a transgression versus a regression and in a wave- versus tide-dominated system.

30. Discuss the factors responsible for the change from a classic “birdsfoot” delta (e.g. the Mississippi River) to a cuspate delta (e.g., the Nile) to a tide-dominated delta (e.g. the Ganges River Delta).

31. Why are the sandstones in northern Ohio thickest just west of Oberlin?

32. How can tectonics relate to the importance of deltas along a coastline?

33. Describe the large-scale depositional processes associated with delta deposition. How do they relate to what we saw in the Amherst Quarry and Old Woman Creek Gorge?

34. What is a reef? What function does it have biologically? Physically?

35. What is the relationship between light, bepth and coar zones?

36. Discuss Darwin's use of spatial change as a proxy for temporal evolution of fringing reefs, barrier reefs and atolls.

37. Why would a reef "give up"? How does this relate to all this transgression/regression stuff we've been discussing?

38. How might Momo sapiens push the reef over the edge? i.e., how might we be responsible for coral reefs lagging behind rising sea level in the future?

39. Why care?

40. What features are characteristic of glacial coasts? How do they form?

41. How are glaciers relaterd to the formation of the Norwegian coast, versus the Main Coast, versus the southern Massachusetts/New York coast?

42. What is the origin of Cape Cod? How about Providence Spit along its northernmost end?

43. What is a fjord and how does it relate to glaciation?

44. What are beach ridges and how do they form?

45. Why did Lake Erie originally drain down the Mississippi River? What changed this? What was the effect on Lake Erie water levels?

46. What is post-glacial rebound? How does it relate to Lake levels in Lake Erie over the past 10,000 years?

47. Why does the sand move to the west near Old Woman Creek, but to the east near the eastern end of the lake?

ADDITIONAL Study Questions:

1. What kinds of things would you consider in setting up a contingency plan for an oil spill?

2. How would a plan for say the Atlantic coast differ from the one you did for Lake Erie?

3. How do changes in the coast (e.g., beach vs estuary; size of beach sediment, beach slope) impact decisions on how you would deal with a hypothetical oil spill? How about oceanographic conditions?

4.Why do beaches erode? How can human activities impact this?

5. What balances are struck in considering whether or not to develop/artificially protect a particular coastline? How about when setting up Coastal Zone Management guidelines?

6. What is the relationship between sea level, sediment supply and beach erosion? How do humans factor in?

7. How does this relate to transgression vs. regression over the past 10-15,000 years? How are we affecting all of this?

8. Describe the relationship between the rate of sea-level rise and transgression/regression on the east vs west coast of the US over the past 10,000 years. When did sediment deposits form? How did they change over that time period? How does this all play into the concept of transgression/regression? How do humans fit in recently?

9. Compare and contract the simple model of a single sea-level rise and fall versus barrier-island deposition that we used early in the course to the idea of parasequences and depositional sequences we have considered in the sequence stratigraphy portiuon of the course.

10. What do we know of the geologic history of Devonian Ohio based on what we have seen in the field (make sure you can locate all our field trips on a map - don't plan to ask me to do this for you in the help session).

11. Was the coastline we visited in southern Michigan erosional or depositional? Explain.

12. How did the dunes form that we walked (fell) on?

13. What was the source of the arcuate beds filled with organic material that we saw in the eroded fronts of "Indiana Dunes"?

14. What went wrong at the Port of Lorain? What mistakes were made and what were the long-term implications?

15. What are the pro's and cons of protecting a port like Lorain - or nourishing Miami Beach - or any other project I might come up with between now and the final exam?

16. What is the relationship between modern environments and ancient facies? What can you tell about the past by looking at both the modern and outcrops?

17. How would you tell an ancient transgressiveshoreline from a regressive one in outcrop? How about on a modern beach/barrier system?

General: I will feel justified in asking you to look at maps and make some basic interpretations, to look at sedimentary structures, etc (to the extent I can in a photo or sketch) or to ask you to use observations on field trips to illustrate conscpts we discussed in class.