Paper #1: Indian Ocean Earthquake and Tsunami
Due Friday, 11 February 2005 at start of class
On 26 December 2004, an earthquake triggered a tsunami that caused enormous destruction. This natural disaster has been described in news reports and scientific commentaries on television, on the internet, and in newspapers. For this assignment, please write about how this event relates to plate tectonics. Imagine that your audience is a highschool science teacher and youšre explaining to them the science behind this event.
Please write not more than 500 words describing the earthquake and tsunami in terms of plate tectonics. The paper will be graded on a ten-point scale. Please use a standard font (Times, Times New Roman, Helvetica, Geneva) and size the text at 12 points.
Paper guidelines and grading:
Paper Format (1 pt): paper must be typed with 1-inch margins; name, date, ESCI 102, and assignment name must be at top of paper. Include the honor pledge text (On my honor, I have neither given nor received any unauthorized aid on this assignment), signed on the bottom of your paper.
Peer-review (1 pt): paper must be reviewed by your Cain Project mentor; you must turn in a copy of the paper with your mentoršs reviews and signature to receive this point.
Gather facts (3 pts): who, what, where, how, why and when of the events; the more descriptive the facts, the more useful they are; numbers are better than words
Analysis (2 pts): what did you learn from these facts? what data are missing? what data are reliable? what data are subject to change?
Organization, clarity and style (2 pts): make sure that the paper has logical organization; one suggestion is to use headings such as Introduction, Earthquake Data and Tsunami Data, Relation to Plate Tectonics, and Conclusions.
References (1 pt): include the sources of information (web sites, books, articles, etc.) you used in your research. Use at least 3 references and cite them. If you use URLs, please also cite the date accessed, and remember to think critically about the accuracy of your web sources! Some places to start include:
http://iri.columbia.edu/~lareef/tsunami/
http://earthguide.ucsd.edu/tsunami/tsunami/links.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Indian_Ocean_earthquake
We will spend a few minutes discussing this topic in class on Friday, 11 February 2005. Please prepare for discussion by writing down 1 interesting thing youšve learned and one question you had.
Late assignments will have a 30% per day penalty. If something prevents you from turning in the paper by the due date, please let us know ahead of time and wešll try to accomodate.
Notes on plagiarism:
Plagiarism is the undocumented inclusion of someone elsešs work within your work. In the context of this assignment, plagiarism means using someone elsešs ideas without citation or reproducing someone elsešs sentence structure and word choices without using quotes and citation. Accepting proofreading help from your mentor or anyone else does NOT count as plagiarism or an honor code violation in fact, we encourage you to have your work proofread by your colleagues! This only becomes a violation if someone else writes sections of your paper for you. You can assume that your Cain mentoršs advice does not violate the honor code. Proofreading by your colleagues will not violate the honor code as long as they do not reword your sentences or add text to your work.