Using a Disaster as a Teachable Moment The 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami: John R. McDaris, Carleton College Heather Macdonald, College of William and Mary Cathy Manduca, Carleton College

The Events NOAA - December 26, :58 UTC  9.0 Earthquake centered just off Sumatra  Tsunami wave heights of 12 m in Banda Aceh, Sumatra  Traversed the Indian Ocean to East Africa in 7 hours  More than 280,000 dead  More than 1,000,000 homeless

 On the Cutting Edge: Faculty Development Program  Teaching Geoscience with Visualizations Digital Globe -

The Power of Visualizations  Ability to Tell Narratives  Ability to Explore and Understand Data ETE - NOAA -

The Collection Visualizations Relating To:  2004 Earthquake and Tsunami  Other Historic Tsunamis  Hypothetical/Model Tsunamis Kenji Satake - Miho Aoki -

Visitors to Tsunami Collection January through March Jan FebMar

Additional Materials  Clearinghouse Sites  Audio/Visual resources  Educational Materials  Outreach Activities  Current Research Sites

The Survey of Educators CONTENT  What did they do or plan to do?  How did it work?  Contribute materials to the collection? USGS -

The Results: Demographics Setting: Group/Class Size:

The Results: What they Did

“I offered to teach a segment on plate tectonics, earthquakes, and tsunamis to a broad- based ‘environmental studies’ class. … We also went to the NOAA site where we viewed the animations developed from modeling the tsunami. In addition, we viewed other pictures of the tsunami …. I found this most informative as many of the photos were clearly fakes, and this allowed us to move into the realm of critical thinking: I asked the students to study the photos and determine whether or not they might be real based on what we actually knew about the characteristics of the Indonesian Tsunami.” “I gave a series of school assemblies to over 1200 students aged in my school in which I used a series of models and demonstrations that were filmed live and projected onto a big screen for the students to see coupled with animations and video footage of our school AS-1 seismograph capturing the earthquake.” “I gave a talk at a large, local retirement community as a part of their Cultural Encounters series. The talk was titled: ‘The Greatest Tsunami Disasters Through Time.’ It focused on not only the Dec. 26 tsunami but also the 1947 Aleutian tsunami, 1960 Chilean tsunami, and 1996 Peruvian tsunami. There was a lengthy discussion session following the 45-minute talk.”

The Results: How it Worked “With my 6 th grade students, I have had them research the causes of a tsunami, the result of the Asian tsunami and the world response. They are currently creating PowerPoint presentations summarizing what they have found. “There is a wealth of information available on the internet and our new laptops with wireless connections make this kind of project possible. This is a good opportunity for gifted students to challenge themselves by going beyond everyday expectations.” “I think all of us feel good about having made an overture to the press, however it would have been nice to have had some prior training on speaking to the press, especially on TV. I think that discomfort with communicating with the press keeps many of us from contacting the press or responding to interview requests on geologic issues. … Maybe we need to develop expertise in this area by sponsoring Press Fellows along the same lines as a Congressional Fellow or installing effective communication with the press on our checklist of skills that our grad students should learn.” “Students enthusiastically enjoyed the discussions. They seemed to have a pent-up need to know and I just used informal discussion time to answer the questions directly to the best of my ability or to let them know that we would cover certain subjects in great detail later in the class.”

Conclusions  ‘Emergency’ in the geoscience education community  Demonstrated ability to respond on short timescales  Collection was popular and reached broad audience  Diverse response of educators Steven Ward -

CREDIT: NASA/Jeff Schmaltz, MODIS Land Rapid Response Team Hurricane Katrina August 28, :20 AM EDT

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