1. Download “Science on a Sphere” Lite. The sphere is on your computer and you use your mouse to rotate the planet. I recommend the plate tectonic overlay. Add earthquakes and volcanoes. It even has mini lessons.
https://sos.noaa.gov/sos-explorer/download-sos-explorer-lite/
2. Watch live video of seafloor venting at Axial Seamount from the OOI Cabled Array. Every 3-hours from 250 miles off the Oregon coast, and 1 mile underwater, live HD video streams of an actively venting hydrothermal chimney at the hours of 2:00, 5:00, 8:00, and 11:00 EDT & PDT day and night, for a duration of 14 minutes.
http://oceanobservatories.org/streaming-underwater-video/
Or if your timing is not right, you can watch time-lapse videos of the same vent at
http://oceanobservatories.org/2017/09/new-computer-vision-routine-developed-for-camhd-time-lapse/
3. See what sea creatures live in the depths at Axial Seamount. Go to the Catalogue of the biology at Axial Seamount, which has pictures, descriptions, and videos of the animals.
http://www.interactiveoceans.washington.edu/story/Biology_at_Axial_Seamount
4. Check out live data from the seafloor to see if Axial Seamount is erupting! During an eruption we expect to see a drop in the caldera floor as magma moves from the magma chamber to the surface. The last eruption was in April 2015 and since then the surface of the caldera floor has been rising as magma moves into the magma chamber below the surface. The real-time data of the caldera floor elevation is found at this website. https://www.pmel.noaa.gov/eoi/rsn/mj03f.html If an eruption is taking place, the elevation of the seafloor (red curve) would drop rapidly and the temperature (in green) would rise. Both could last days or weeks, depending on how long the eruption lasts. This is what we see at the beginning of the graph below when an eruption took place in April 2015 – the red curve dropped (seafloor elevation) and the green curve rose (temperature). Since then the seafloor has been rising back upward. When it gets back up to the level it was at before the last eruption it will be ready to erupt again. There is an Event Alarm Status page you can check too.
https://www.pmel.noaa.gov/eoi/rsn/alarms.html
5. Watch some of the videos in the
Awesome Videos, including a Jason ROV dive to explore the 2015 Axial eruption lava flows (about 4 minutes long). The animal life seen on that video came along since the eruption. After that you may want to show your students this video of pillow lava being formed in an eruption in Hawaii. Turn your sound down…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DdIUuUY0L9c
