Abstract
Abstract. We present the content and scripting of an active tectonic lab session conceived for third-year undergraduate students studying Earth sciences at Observatoire des Sciences de l'Univers in Lyon. This session is based on a research project conducted on the submarine Roseau active fault in the Lesser Antilles. The fault morphology is particularly interesting to map as this structure in the deep ocean is preserved from weathering. Thus, high-resolution models computed from remotely operated vehicle (ROV) videos provide exceptional educational material to link fault morphology and coseismic displacement. This class includes mapping exercises on geographical information systems and virtual fieldwork to provide basic understanding of active tectonics and active fault morphology in particular. The work has been conducted either in a full remote configuration via 3D online models or in virtual reality (VR) in a dedicated room using the Minerve software. During the VR sessions, students were either alone in the VR environment or participated as a group that included the instructor (physically in the classroom or remotely from another location), which is to our knowledge one of the first attempts of this kind in France. We discuss the efficiency of virtual fieldwork using VR based on feedback from teachers and students. We conclude that VR is a promising tool to learn observational skills in Earth sciences, subject to certain improvements that should be possible in the years to come.
Highlights
The seismic hazard in Metropolitan France is relatively low (e.g., Duverger et al, 2021)
These submarine studies provided a unique opportunity to bring our students to the field, at 1200 m b.s.l., through virtual reality, and we describe this experiment in this paper
In-person lab sessions are more efficient to help the students both with technical issues (QGIS is already installed in the latest version, plugins can be installed, problems in saving the new shapefiles can be directly solved, etc.) and for guiding the interpretation of the DEM
Summary
The seismic hazard in Metropolitan France is relatively low (e.g., Duverger et al, 2021). A team of researchers involved in projects aiming at understanding the active tectonics of the French Lesser Antilles (Escartín et al, 2016; Leclerc et al, 2016; Istenicet al., 2020) developed an interactive free and open-source software (Minerve; see Billant et al, 2019) to collaborate on very-high-resolution (∼ 1 m to 10 cm) DEMs and DOMs (digital elevation models and digital outcrop models, respectively) of the submarine active normal Roseau fault scarp that was reactivated during the 2004 Les Saintes earthquake (Mw 6.3) (Escartín et al, 2016) These submarine studies provided a unique opportunity to bring our students to the field, at 1200 m b.s.l., through virtual reality, and we describe this experiment in this paper
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