Ausgeology. Senior secondary lessons

SACE Stage 1 Earth and Environmental Science · Topic 1: Turbulent Earth

Turbulent Earth.

Earthquakes, eruptions, tsunamis and impacts start in one sphere and spread to the rest. Take a role on a hazard response team and work through four real crises, making each call before you find out what happened.

How the lesson works

1 · The briefing

Screens 2 and 3. Learn the kinds of Earth hazard, how they spread between the spheres, and how a subduction zone makes earthquakes, tsunamis and volcanoes.

2 · Three crises

Screens 4 to 6. Three crisis files: the eruption of Pinatubo in 1991, the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami in 2011, and the Christchurch earthquakes.

3 · Prediction and the unexpected

Screens 7 and 8. What data can and cannot predict, how warnings work and fail, and an asteroid that arrived with no warning at all.

4 · Review

Screens 9 and 10. Review the strategies, see how people make some hazards more frequent, finish your report, then show what you know.

Your role

You are on a hazard advisory team. In each crisis you get the information in the order it arrived, make your call, then see what really happened.

Choose one of four roles below. Each crisis gives your role its own briefing. By screen 9 you will have an after-action report written from your role.

Choose your role

What we are learning

How Earth hazards arise from plate tectonics and from space, how one hazard spreads between the spheres, how scientists monitor and forecast hazards, and which strategies lessen the harm to people.

I can

  • 1describe different types of Earth hazard and how a hazard in one sphere can cause another.
  • 2describe how Earth hazards affect life, health, poverty and the environment.
  • 3describe how plate tectonics generates earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and tsunamis.
  • 4explain how volcanoes are monitored and use monitoring data to judge an alert.
  • 5explain how an earthquake or eruption affects other Earth systems.
  • 6evaluate strategies that lessen the severity of Earth hazards.
  • 7explain the difference between predicting and forecasting, and how data are used to map hazards and give warnings.
  • 8describe an extraterrestrial impact and how it affects Earth systems.
  • 9explain how human activity can influence the frequency of some hazards.

SACE Stage 1 Earth and Environmental Science, Topic 1: Turbulent Earth. This lesson covers all four of the topic’s Science Understanding statements. The teacher notes at the end quote them in full.

My notebook

Printable activity

Crisis log

Three pages: a role card, a decision log for each crisis (your call, what happened, what you would change), a sphere-chain diagram and a planner for the after-action report. Print one per student, or one per group of four.

Crisis log (PDF) Editable (Word)

1The briefing

Earth hazards.

What makes something an Earth hazard, and why does one hazard so often set off another?

Before the first crisis, your team needs a common language: the kinds of hazard, how they move between the spheres, and who they hurt.

This screen · about 30 minutes

  1. Read about the types of Earth hazard.
  2. Sort six hazards by the spheres they link.
  3. Read how hazards affected people in Australia and Cameroon, then answer the check.
  4. Write down what your role will watch for.

Hazards start in one sphere and spread

An Earth hazard is a natural event that can harm people, property or the environment. The SACE outline lists earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions, hurricanes, floods, droughts, landslides, extreme weather, lightning-induced fires, sinkholes, coastal erosion and comet or asteroid impacts. Some start in the geosphere, some in the atmosphere, and a few come from space.

Few stay in one sphere. About 75% of tsunamis are caused by large earthquakes on the sea floor “causing the overlying water to move”; others come from volcanic collapses, landslides or a meteorite hitting the ocean (Geoscience Australia). The hazard that does the damage is often not the first one: at Nevado del Ruiz in Colombia in 1985, a small eruption melted about ten percent of the summit ice, and the mudflows (lahars) it made travelled 100 km and killed more than 23,000 people. Three-quarters of the 28,700 people in the town of Armero died (USGS).

From one sphere to another

Hazards and people

Darwin, 1974

Cyclone Tracy killed 66 people, 45 in the city and 21 at sea (Bureau of Meteorology). About 10,000 houses were destroyed and 40,000 of Darwin’s 47,000 people were left homeless; more than 30,000 were evacuated, and the airlift remains the largest in Australia’s history. Rebuilding had to meet new cyclone-resistant building standards, with roofing screwed down instead of nailed (Haghani and Stukas, 2024).

North Queensland, 2006 and 2011

Cyclone Larry destroyed 80–90% of Australia’s banana crop (Bureau of Meteorology), and banana prices rose about 250% in the following quarter (Australian Bureau of Statistics). Cyclone Yasi affected 75% of Queensland’s banana crops in 2011, and banana prices rose more than 400% over the year to June 2011 (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2017).

Lake Nyos, Cameroon, 1986

On 21 August, carbon dioxide that had built up under pressure in the deep water of a volcanic crater lake burst out. The gas cloud killed between 1,700 and 1,800 people and some 3,000 cattle (Britannica). Victims were asphyxiated (Britannica). Since 2001, gas has been piped out of the lake, but gas keeps entering it from below (Kling and others, 2005).

Which is the best example of a hazard in one sphere causing a hazard in another?

For your report

1The briefing

Where the hazards come from.

Why do the world’s biggest earthquakes, many of its volcanoes and most tsunamis happen in the same places?

The Tōhoku earthquake on screen 5 happened at a subduction zone. Step through one to see how a single plate boundary can make all three hazards.

This screen · about 25 minutes

  1. Step through the subduction zone.
  2. Sort six events by whether they are likely to make a tsunami.
  3. Read about Australia’s position, then answer the checks.
  4. Explain the link in your own words.

Not every earthquake makes a tsunami

“When the surface of the seafloor moves vertically, a tsunami is born” (USGS). Most tsunamis come from earthquakes “with magnitudes over 7.0 that occur under or very near the ocean”, usually less than 100 km deep and on thrust faults, where one block of rock is pushed up over another (NOAA). In the deep ocean “tsunamis can move as fast as a jet plane, over 500 mph” (NOAA), about 800 km an hour, and the waves build higher as the water gets shallower near the coast (NOAA Ocean Service).

Tsunami or not?

Australia, in the middle of a plate

Earthquakes are “most frequent and largest at tectonic plate boundaries” (Geoscience Australia). Australia lies inside a plate, where earthquakes “are less frequent and do not follow easily recognisable patterns”. Its tsunami hazard is “moderate along the west coast of Western Australia” because of the large subduction zones south of Indonesia: the highest tsunami run-up recorded in Australia, 7.9 m at Steep Point, came from the Java tsunami of July 2006 (Geoscience Australia).

Earthquakes inside a plate can still do damage. Most of South Australia’s earthquakes “occur in the Flinders Ranges and Mount Lofty Ranges” (Adelaidia). The Flinders Ranges form “one of the most seismically active zones within the Australian continent”, and their activity reflects “increases in stress levels in the Indo-Australian plate” (Célérier and others, 2005). In the early hours of 1 March 1954 a magnitude 5.4 earthquake shook Adelaide. There was “slight damage throughout the metropolitan area but severe damage further south near Darlington”, and more than 30,000 insurance claims were made (Adelaidia), but no one was killed (Australian Earthquake Engineering Society). It was “the most damaging earthquake to impact the densely populated Adelaide region since European settlement” (Martin and others, 2022).

The largest earthquake recorded in Australia happened in the Northern Territory. On 22 January 1988 three large earthquakes struck near Tennant Creek, and the largest, magnitude 6.6, is “now considered Australia’s largest ever recorded earthquake” (Geoscience Australia, 2016). The ground broke along scarps with “a total length of about 32 km” (Crone and others, 1992), and “A buried natural-gas pipeline was shortened by 1 m at the surface rupture” (Geoscience Australia).

Why do subduction zones produce earthquakes, tsunamis and volcanoes?

Adelaide and Tennant Creek are far from any plate boundary. Why do they still have earthquakes?

In your own words

2Three crises

Crisis 1: a volcano wakes.

When the data keep changing, when do you tell 60,000 people to leave?

Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines woke in April 1991 and erupted on 15 June. You get the monitoring data in the order the scientists got it, and you make the calls before you see theirs.

This screen · about 40 minutes

  1. Read how volcanoes are monitored.
  2. Work through the crisis file, making each call in your role before you read on.
  3. Read the gas graph, then answer the check.
  4. Write your role’s view of the crisis for your report.

Reading a restless volcano

Volcanologists watch three main things. The first is earthquakes: rising magma makes “the ground above to heave and shake as rock is shoved aside or broken” (USGS). The second is the shape of the ground, which can show “swelling, sinking, or cracking”, measured with tiltmeters, GPS receivers and satellite radar (InSAR) (USGS). The third is gas: magma gives off carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide and other gases, and sulfur dioxide can be measured from aircraft, from the ground and from satellites (USGS).

None of these gives a date. Scientists cannot “predict the exact time and place of eruptions”, but changes in these signs let them “anticipate with varying degrees of certainty, the style and timing of an eruption” (USGS). And “most times unrest does not lead to eruptions” (USGS).

Show the numbers as a table

On 5 June 1991 the sulfur dioxide from Pinatubo fell to 260 tonnes a day. Why did PHIVOLCS raise the alert level instead of lowering it?

For your report

2Three crises

Crisis 2: the wave.

What do you do when the first warning is wrong, and the sea wall is not high enough?

On 11 March 2011 Japan’s first tsunami warning went out three minutes after the earthquake. It was too low, some sea walls were not high enough, and then the wave reached a nuclear power plant.

This screen · about 40 minutes

  1. Work through the crisis file, making each call in your role.
  2. Follow the chain of hazards from the sea floor to the power plant.
  3. Answer the check.
  4. Write your role’s view of the crisis for your report.

From one sphere to the next

Why were the first tsunami warnings for Tōhoku too low, and what corrected them?

For your report

2Three crises

Crisis 3: the second shock.

Why did a smaller earthquake kill 185 people when a larger one killed nobody, and why do poor countries suffer most?

Christchurch survived a magnitude 7.1 earthquake in 2010. Five months later a magnitude 6.2 struck right under the city. Then compare two earthquakes from the same year, in Haiti and Chile.

This screen · about 40 minutes

  1. Work through the Christchurch crisis file in your role.
  2. Compare the Haiti and Chile earthquakes.
  3. Answer the check.
  4. Write your role’s view for your report.

Haiti and Chile, 2010

On 12 January 2010 a magnitude 7.0 earthquake struck 25 km from Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince, at a depth of 13 km (Britannica). Six weeks later, on 27 February, a magnitude 8.8 earthquake struck Chile. The Chilean earthquake released about 500 times more energy (Associated Press, 2010), yet Chile’s official death toll was 528 (European Commission, 2010), while estimates for Haiti range from 85,000 to 316,000 (Britannica).

Damage in Chile was likely limited by “stringent building codes instituted in the wake of the 1960 earthquake” (Britannica). In Haiti, Hough and others (2010) accept that “the extent of structural damage in the 2010 Haiti earthquake was primarily due to poor construction”, though they show that hilltop shaking added to the damage in one district. In 2010 Chile’s GDP per person was about US$12,600 and Haiti’s about US$1,200 (World Bank). Poverty makes people more vulnerable: it shapes how houses are built and whether codes exist or are enforced.

Show the numbers as a table

In Nepal in 2015, a magnitude 7.6 earthquake (as Nepal’s seismological centre measured it) killed more than 8,790 people and destroyed over half a million houses (Government of Nepal, 2015); it set off 4,312 landslides within six weeks (Kargel and others, 2016).

Chile’s 2010 earthquake was far larger than Haiti’s, but Haiti lost many more lives. What is the main reason?

For your report

3Prediction and the unexpected

Predicting, forecasting and warning.

If earthquakes cannot be predicted, how do scientists map the danger and warn people in time?

Your team has been through three crises. Now step back: what can the data tell us before an event, what can they tell us once it has started, and what happens when the message goes wrong?

This screen · about 35 minutes

  1. Read the difference between a prediction and a forecast, and how hazard maps are made.
  2. Sort six statements, then compare tsunami warning systems.
  3. Work through the L’Aquila case and a false alarm, then answer the check.
  4. Write your role’s view for your report.

Prediction and forecast

“Neither the USGS nor any other scientists have ever predicted a major earthquake”, and the USGS does not expect to be able to “any time in the foreseeable future”. A prediction would have to give the date and time, the location and the magnitude. What scientists can do is calculate the probability that a significant earthquake will occur “in a specific area within a certain number of years” (USGS): a forecast.

Forecasts are built from data on past earthquakes. Geoscience Australia’s National Seismic Hazard Assessment “defines variations in the level of earthquake ground shaking hazard across Australia”. Its headline hazard map shows the shaking that has a 10% chance of being exceeded in 50 years, and Australian Standards and insurers use it (Geoscience Australia). After a large earthquake, aftershock forecasts give the chance of damaging aftershocks from “a statistical model of the behavior of past aftershock sequences”; “there are about 10 times as many aftershocks on the first day as on the tenth day” (USGS).

Prediction, forecast or warning?

Tsunami warning systems

Indian Ocean, 2004

A magnitude 9.1 earthquake off Sumatra caused a tsunami that left 227,898 people dead or missing, and displaced people in 14 countries (USGS). “Prior to 2005, there was no coordinated regional tsunami warning and mitigation system” in the Indian Ocean (UNESCO-IOC, 2019).

Indian Ocean, since 2011

The Indian Ocean Tsunami Warning and Mitigation System became operational on 12 October 2011, with Australia, India and Indonesia as its three service providers (UNESCO-IOC, 2019). In April 2012 a magnitude 8.6 earthquake tested it: in Sri Lanka, “Within 20 minutes, three million people had moved from the seashore to safer places”, but in Aceh the power was cut and the tsunami siren did not sound until 30 minutes after the quake (Reuters, 2012).

Australia

The Joint Australian Tsunami Warning Centre, run by the Bureau of Meteorology with Geoscience Australia, has operated since 2008. It aims to warn within 30 minutes of any magnitude 6.5+ undersea earthquake and gives at least 90 minutes’ warning to mainland Australia (Bureau of Meteorology). DART systems use a pressure recorder on the sea floor that can detect a tsunami as small as 1 cm, and a surface buoy that sends the reading by satellite to warning centres (NOAA).

The other kind of mistake

In August 1976, on scientists’ advice, the authorities evacuated about 73,000 people from around La Soufrière volcano in Guadeloupe. Scientists disagreed about what was happening; people were told to return on 1 December, and no major magmatic eruption followed (Beauducel and Besson, 2008). The evacuation cost an estimated 60% of the island’s annual GDP per person (Hincks and others, 2014). Looking back with the data available at the time, a later study put the chance of a magmatic eruption at about 0.4 (Hincks and others, 2014). Was the evacuation a mistake, with a 40% chance of eruption?

Alert scales differ too. Pinatubo’s 1991 levels described what might happen within a time window. New Zealand’s volcanic alert levels describe what a volcano is doing now, and GeoNet warns that “An eruption may occur at any level, and levels may not move in sequence” (GeoNet).

What were the L’Aquila scientists originally convicted of?

For your report

3Prediction and the unexpected

Crisis 4: from space.

What happens to Earth’s spheres when something from space hits, and can it be stopped?

The last crisis came without any warning at all. Then look back 66 million years at the impact that ended the age of dinosaurs, and forward to the first test of moving an asteroid.

This screen · about 30 minutes

  1. Work through the Chelyabinsk crisis file in your role.
  2. Compare three impacts, then sort the effects of Chicxulub by sphere.
  3. Answer the check.
  4. Write your role’s view for your report.

Three impacts

Chelyabinsk, 2013

An object 17 to 20 m across exploded in the air with the energy of about 500 kilotonnes of TNT (Brown and others, 2013). About 1,500 people were hurt, by glass (European Space Agency, 2023).

Tunguska, Siberia, 1908

An object 50 to 100 m across exploded about 6 to 10 km above the ground. No crater has been confirmed, but it toppled trees across hundreds of square kilometres of forest (NASA Earth Observatory). A 2019 NASA study put the explosion at 10 to 30 megatonnes (NASA Ames, 2019).

Chicxulub, Mexico, 66 million years ago

A large asteroid hit what is now the Yucatán Peninsula. The extinction that followed removed “around three-quarters of all living species” (Morgan and others, 2022). Life through deep time follows how the evidence for it was found.

Australia has impact craters too. Wolfe Creek Crater (Kandimalal) in Western Australia is 892 m across on average and most likely about 120,000 years old (Barrows and others, 2019).

Chicxulub: which sphere?

Why were so many people hurt at Chelyabinsk, when the asteroid exploded 23 km above the ground?

For your report

4Review

After-action review.

Which strategies lessened the harm, and how are people changing how often some hazards happen?

Every response team meets after a crisis to work out what to keep and what to change. Yours does it now, with one more question: some hazards are not entirely natural.

This screen · about 35 minutes

  1. Read how human activity can change how often some hazards happen, and read the earthquake chart.
  2. Sort the strategies from all four crises.
  3. Answer the check.
  4. Write your recommendations, then put your report together.

Hazards people make more likely

Earthquakes of magnitude 3 or more in the central United States averaged 24 a year from 1973 to 2008, then rose to 688 in 2014. “Wastewater disposal is the primary cause of the recent increase”: water pumped deep underground from oil and gas wells. Fracking itself “is not causing most of the induced earthquakes” (USGS, 2015). In Oklahoma, after regulators began closing some disposal wells and cutting injection volumes, the yearly count fell from 903 in 2015 to 196 in 2018 (Insurance Journal, 2019).

Filling a large reservoir can also trigger earthquakes. The Koyna Dam in India has been seismically active since it was filled in 1962, and in 1967 a magnitude 6.3 earthquake there killed 177 people (USGS) or 200 (Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America, 1997). Closer to home, Klose (2007) argued that coal mining and groundwater removal may have triggered the 1989 Newcastle earthquake, which killed 13 people (Australian Institute for Disaster Resilience); Quinn and others (2008) replied that his conclusion “is not supported by his own model or by available geological and seismic data”. People change floods as well: “Urbanization generally increases the size and frequency of floods” (Konrad, 2003).

Show the numbers as a table

What kind of strategy?

Oklahoma’s earthquakes fell from 903 in 2015 to 196 in 2018. What does that suggest?

For your report

Put your report together

Your notes save in this browser as you type. The report gathers them in order under your role. Copy it into a document to finish it.

5Show what you know

Show what you know.

Nine questions, one for each of the I can statements on screen 1. You get one try at each, so think before you tap.

Which pair shows a hazard in the geosphere causing a hazard in the hydrosphere?

Cyclone Larry hit north Queensland in 2006. How did it affect people in the rest of Australia?

At a subduction zone, what starts a tsunami?

A volcano’s earthquakes and ground swelling are increasing, but its sulfur dioxide has suddenly dropped. What is the best reading?

How did the 1991 eruption of Pinatubo affect the atmosphere?

Kamaishi’s breakwater was badly damaged in 2011. What is the best judgement of it?

Which statement is a forecast, not a prediction?

Which list best shows how the Chicxulub impact affected Earth’s spheres?

Which is the best example of human activity increasing how often a hazard happens?

Printable activity

Crisis log

Three pages: a role card, a decision log for each crisis (your call, what happened, what you would change), a sphere-chain diagram and a planner for the after-action report. Print one per student, or one per group of four.

Crisis log (PDF) Editable (Word)
For teachers

Curriculum

SACE Board of South Australia, Stage 1 Earth and Environmental Science Subject Outline (reissued for 2025), Topic 1: Turbulent Earth. NT students take the subject as part of the NTCET. The topic outline begins:

Natural hazards such as earthquakes, tsunamis, and volcanic eruptions affect life on Earth. In this topic students collect, analyse, and interpret data relating to the cause and impact of Earth hazards. They critically analyse the range of factors that influence the magnitude, frequency, intensity, and management of Earth hazards at local, regional, and global levels.

Students explore how the interactions of Earth systems may result in Earth hazards. They investigate ways in which scientific data are used to predict and mitigate the damage caused by these hazards, recognising their social responsibility and the need to plan for the future to protect the biosphere.

The topic’s Science Understanding statements and dot points, all of which this lesson covers:

Interactions of Earth systems may result in Earth hazards.

  • Describe different types of Earth hazards.
  • Describe how Earth hazards affect life, health, poverty, and the environment.
  • Explain how occurrence of Earth hazards in one sphere can affect Earth processes in other spheres.
  • Investigate how human activity influences the frequency and intensity of some hazards.
  • Discuss different strategies that have helped lessen the severity of Earth hazards.

Processes within the geosphere generate Earth hazards.

  • Describe how plate tectonics generate earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and tsunamis.
  • Discuss how earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and tsunamis affect other Earth systems processes.

The impact of extraterrestrial bodies can affect Earth systems.

  • Describe an extraterrestrial impact and how it affects Earth systems.

Earthquake and volcanic eruption data can be used to map hazardous zones and to predict future events.

  • Describe how Earth hazards are monitored by measuring various factors.
  • Discuss how data can contribute to future predictions of Earth hazards.

Where the lesson covers them:

  • Types of Earth hazard: screen 2 (the outline’s list, Nevado del Ruiz, Tracy, Larry and Yasi, Lake Nyos), x1.
  • How hazards affect life, health, poverty and the environment: screen 2 (the cyclones and Lake Nyos), screen 6 (Christchurch; Haiti and Chile; Nepal), screen 5 (deaths and disaster-related deaths at Tōhoku), x2.
  • How a hazard in one sphere affects processes in other spheres: screen 2 (the sphere sort), screen 4 (Pinatubo’s cooling and lahars), screen 5 (the chain from the fault to Fukushima), screen 8 (Chicxulub sort), x1 and x5.
  • How human activity influences the frequency and intensity of some hazards: screen 9 (Oklahoma, Koyna, the Newcastle debate, urban floods), x9.
  • Strategies that have lessened the severity of hazards: screens 4, 5 and 6 (evacuation, warnings, the Kamaishi breakwater, building law, the red zone), screen 9 (the strategy sort), x6.
  • How plate tectonics generates earthquakes, eruptions and tsunamis, and how they affect other Earth systems: screen 3 (the subduction stepper, the tsunami sort, and intraplate earthquakes at Adelaide in 1954 and Tennant Creek in 1988), screen 5, x3.
  • Extraterrestrial impacts and their effects on Earth systems: screen 8 (Chelyabinsk, Tunguska, Chicxulub, DART), x8.
  • Monitoring hazards and using data to map hazardous zones and predict events: screen 4 (seismicity, gas, tilt and the SO2 data), screen 5 (GPS buoys), screen 7 (prediction and forecasting, the National Seismic Hazard Assessment, warning systems, L’Aquila, Guadeloupe), x4 and x7.

The lesson uses these of the outline’s possible contexts: examples of life affected by hazards (Lake Nyos 1986, Cyclone Tracy, Cyclones Yasi and Larry, Christchurch 2011, Tōhoku 2011, Nepal 2015); sphere interactions (ash clouds and global weather, undersea earthquakes and tsunamis, lightning and fires, bushfires and the atmosphere); tsunami barriers in Japan, earthquake-resistant buildings and monitoring; how earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and tsunamis are related; extraterrestrial impacts causing a tsunami, an earthquake, climate change and extinction; comparing tsunami early-warning systems; and using volatiles and earth tremors to predict eruptions.

One possible context needs a caution: that “volcanic activity at the East Pacific Rise may affect El Niño cycles”. It rests on a few pieces in Eos from 1988 to 1995 (Shaw and Moore, 1988), which were contested at the time under the title “Link between El Niños and seismicity is still missing” (Forsyth and others, 1995), and we found no later research that confirms it. The lesson leaves it out; it could be used as an example of a contested idea.

Key concepts of science as a human endeavour from the outline, and where they are used:

The use of scientific knowledge may have beneficial or unexpected consequences; this requires monitoring, assessment, and evaluation of risk, and provides opportunities for innovation.

Screens 4 and 5: monitoring data turned into alert levels and warnings; screen 8: DART as an innovation in reducing risk.

Science informs public debate and is in turn influenced by public debate; at times, there may be complex, unanticipated variables or insufficient data that may limit possible conclusions.

Screen 7: L’Aquila and Guadeloupe; screen 6: the New Zealand debate over earthquake-prone buildings; screen 9: Newcastle and coal mining.

Collaboration between scientists, governments, and other agencies is often required in scientific research and enterprise.

Screen 4: PHIVOLCS and the USGS at Pinatubo; screen 7: the Indian Ocean warning system and the Joint Australian Tsunami Warning Centre.

Stage 1 is assessed through an investigations folio and skills and applications tasks. The after-action report suits a skills and applications task; the SO2 data and the Oklahoma counts can start a data-analysis task.

How the lesson is taught

The lesson is a role-play crisis simulation. Students take one of four roles (monitoring scientist, emergency manager, engineer, community and health officer), receive information in the order it arrived during real events, and make a call at each decision point before they can see what happened. Classroom volcanic-crisis simulations go back at least to Harpp and Sweeney (2002), whose design later role-plays built on (Dohaney and others, 2015). In a university role-play of a volcanic crisis, students found the exercise “a highly challenging and engaging learning experience” and “reported improved skills”, though the gains “varied depending on the students’ background, preparedness, and personality” (Dohaney and others, 2015). A related study found significant gains in communication confidence, largest for students who started with low confidence (Dohaney and others, 2017).

The wider evidence is encouraging but not specific to school science. A meta-analysis of twelve studies of role-play across subjects found an average effect size of 0.82 (Fu and Li, 2025), and one of 145 studies of simulation-based learning in higher education found g = 0.85, with scaffolding helping (Chernikova and others, 2020). The cautions are about time and focus: the Volcanic Hazards Simulation (Dohaney and others) runs for 4 to 6 hours with a low student-to-staff ratio (SERC), and in one study of undergraduate role-play videos, students voting on each other’s work were “probably placing more weight on the ‘entertainment value’” than on the scientific detail (Young, 2020). This lesson keeps the simulation inside a structure: every decision card gives feedback on what the choice risks, the screens add the science that the decisions need, and each crisis ends with a check and a report section.

  • Timing. About five and a half hours: seven 50-minute lessons. Lesson 1: screens 1 and 2. Lesson 2: screen 3, then start screen 4. Lesson 3: finish screen 4. Lesson 4: screen 5. Lesson 5: screen 6. Lesson 6: screens 7 and 8. Lesson 7: screens 9 and 10.
  • Running it as a class. In groups of four, each student takes a different role and reads only their own briefing at each card; the group must agree on each call before anyone opens the next card. The “Show every role’s briefing” box lets a student working alone see them all. Projected, the class can vote at each card, then compare with what happened.
  • Pressure. Real crises run on the clock. A timer of two or three minutes per decision makes the trade-offs sharper; leave it off for students who find time pressure stressful.
  • Debrief. After each crisis, ask each role what it knew that others did not, and which decision it would change. Screen 9 is the full debrief.
  • The report. Notes save in the browser on the device being used. Students who change devices should copy the report out on screen 9 at the end of each lesson, or keep their notes on the printable sheet.

Handle with care

  • Some students will have lived through cyclones, floods or bushfires, or have family in places hit by earthquakes or tsunamis. The scenarios are real events in which many people died. Tell students in advance, let them choose a role that feels manageable, and keep the focus on decisions and evidence. We found no research on the emotional load of disaster role-plays for school students; this is a professional judgement.
  • Students in Darwin may know Cyclone Tracy from family. It appears briefly on screen 2 and as an option for the final recommendations.
  • The role-play asks students to make calls that real people made with lives at stake. Make it clear that the feedback judges the reasoning in hindsight, not the people involved.

Misconceptions the screens target

  • Scientists can predict earthquakes (screen 7, q-predict, x7). They can forecast probabilities; no major earthquake has ever been predicted.
  • Less gas from a volcano means less danger (screen 4, q-volcano, x4). At Pinatubo a sudden drop came before the eruption.
  • The first warning is reliable (screen 5, q-tsunami). Tōhoku’s first magnitude was far too low.
  • Bigger earthquakes always kill more people (screen 6, q-quake). Building codes and poverty matter as much as size.
  • A defence that is overwhelmed has failed completely (screen 5, x6). Kamaishi’s breakwater reduced the wave and bought time.
  • Every large undersea earthquake makes a tsunami (screen 3). Depth and the direction of movement matter.
  • Earth hazards are entirely natural (screen 9, x9). Wastewater injection raised earthquake numbers in Oklahoma.
  • Asteroid impacts are only a thing of the past, or nothing can be done about them (screen 8). Chelyabinsk was in 2013, and DART changed an asteroid’s orbit in 2022.

About the data and the models

  • The crisis files follow published accounts in the order events happened. Briefings for each role are written for the lesson from those accounts; they are not quotations from the people involved.
  • The SO2 graph (screen 4) uses Table 1 of Daag and others (1996). The 10 June reading was off scale (more than 13,000 t/d) and is plotted at 13,000. No source gives a day-by-day earthquake count for Pinatubo that we could use, so the earthquakes are described in words.
  • The Haiti and Chile chart (screen 6) uses a logarithmic scale, and shows Haiti’s toll as a range because estimates differ by more than three times.
  • The earthquake chart (screen 9) mixes two series: the central United States (USGS) and Oklahoma alone (Oklahoma Geological Survey, reported by Insurance Journal). The bars are labelled.
  • The subduction diagram (screen 3) is schematic and not to scale.
  • Quotations in the screens are short excerpts checked against the source pages; where a sentence continues, the lesson quotes only the part shown.

Where sources disagree

  • Pinatubo: deaths of 200 to 300 during the eruption (Wolfe and Hoblitt, 1996) or a total of 847 (USGS); 15 million tonnes of SO2 and 0.6 °C of cooling (NASA) or nearly 20 million tons and 0.5 °C (USGS); the 30 km evacuation radius on 14 June (Punongbayan and others, 1996) or from 12 June (Wolfe and Hoblitt, 1996).
  • Tōhoku magnitude: 9.0 (JMA) or 9.1 (USGS catalogue). Deaths and missing have been revised over the years; the lesson uses the National Police Agency’s 2026 figures. Highest run-up: 39.7 m at Miyako (Mori and others, 2011) or 40 m at Taro and Ryori (Tomita and others, 2013). The figures for Taro’s wall and the new sea walls come from a news agency (AFP, 2021); we found no government source.
  • Christchurch: magnitude 6.2 or 6.3 (GeoNet pages differ); 185 deaths (Royal Commission, GeoNet). Darfield: 7.1 or 7.2.
  • Haiti: deaths from “no more than 85,000” to 316,000 (Britannica). Chile: 528 (European Commission, via ReliefWeb) or “more than 500” (Britannica). Nepal: magnitude 7.6 (Nepal’s seismological centre) or 7.8 (often cited from the USGS); more than 8,790 deaths in Nepal (Government of Nepal) or over 9,000 in four countries (Kargel and others, 2016).
  • 2004 Indian Ocean: 227,898 killed or missing (USGS) or more than 230,000 (UNESCO-IOC).
  • Koyna 1967: 177 deaths (USGS) or 200 (Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America). Newcastle 1989: 13 deaths (AIDR) or 12; magnitude 5.6 (Richter) or Mw 5.4 (Geoscience Australia); triggered by mining (Klose, 2007) or not (Quinn and others, 2008).
  • Cyclone Tracy: 66 deaths (Bureau of Meteorology) or 71 (Haghani and Stukas, 2024).
  • Adelaide 1954: magnitude 5.4 in Geoscience Australia’s catalogue, but 5.5 or 5.6 in other sources; from the shaking reports, Martin and others (2022) estimate about 6.0 and question the usual epicentre near Darlington. Injuries: 3 (Australian Earthquake Engineering Society) or 16 (Mark Tingay, University of Adelaide, on Scimex).
  • Tennant Creek 1988: magnitudes 6.3, 6.4 and 6.7 in an earlier Geoscience Australia catalogue record, revised to 6.2, 6.3 and 6.6 in 2016 (Geoscience Australia data, reported by the ABC). Other catalogues give other values, so the lesson does not ask for a magnitude.
  • Chelyabinsk: about 500 kilotonnes (Brown and others, 2013) or 440 (an early JPL estimate). Tunguska: 10 to 30 megatonnes (NASA Ames, 2019); NASA Earth Observatory gives no figure.
  • La Soufrière, Guadeloupe: an evacuation of about 3.5 months by the official dates (Beauducel and Besson, 2008) or “6-month” (Hincks and others, 2014), probably because many people left on their own earlier.
  • Lake Nyos: between 1,700 and 1,800 deaths (Britannica) or “more than 1,700” (USGS).

Answers at a glance

  • Screen checks: q-briefing, an undersea earthquake making a tsunami; q-plates, the locked fault slips and lifts the sea floor, and water from the sinking plate helps melting; q-intraplate, stress inside the plate breaks rock along faults; q-volcano, the other signs were rising and the gas may have been trapped; q-tsunami, the first magnitude was too low and buoys measured the rise; q-quake, building quality and codes; q-predict, false reassurance; q-impact, the shock wave broke windows with no warning; q-review, cutting injection reduced the earthquakes.
  • Sphere sort (screen 2): tsunami and lahars, geosphere to hydrosphere; Tambora and vog, geosphere to atmosphere; lightning fire, atmosphere to biosphere; pyrocumulonimbus, biosphere to atmosphere.
  • Tsunami sort (screen 3): the megathrust quake, a volcanic collapse and a meteorite in the ocean are likely; the deep quake, the inland quake and the strike-slip quake are unlikely.
  • Tōhoku chain (screen 5): the fault slips, the sea floor lifts, the tsunami crosses the ocean, the waves overtop the walls, the plant loses power, the cores melt.
  • Prediction sort (screen 7): the Adelaide date and time is a prediction; the 50-year shaking, the aftershock chance and the 30-year chance are forecasts; the two tsunami messages are warnings.
  • Chicxulub sort (screen 8): ejected rock and shaking, geosphere; the tsunami, hydrosphere; aerosols and cooling, atmosphere; photosynthesis and extinction, biosphere.
  • Strategy sort (screen 9): PHIVOLCS and the tsunami warning centre, monitoring; Kamaishi, Chile’s codes, Lake Nyos pipes and Darwin’s standards, engineering; the red zone, land use; Sri Lanka, preparing people.
  • The crisis files have no wrong answers; each call gets feedback on what it risks, then what really happened.
  • Exit check: x1 an undersea earthquake and a tsunami; x2 banana prices; x3 the upper plate springing up; x4 gas trapped under sealed magma; x5 cooling from the sulfur haze; x6 it reduced the wave and bought time; x7 the 10% in 50 years forecast; x8 tsunami, shaking, darkness and extinction; x9 wastewater injection.

Saved progress

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References

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  • Kargel, J. S., and others (2016). Geomorphic and geologic controls of geohazards induced by Nepal’s 2015 Gorkha earthquake. Science.
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Sources by screen

Word list