Hi Kristie,
I love your thinking on how to incorporate the geosciences into the study of this book.
Interdisciplinary research studies are where it is at, too. I was just on a call with people from the private sector and graduate schools who said that they need graduates who have done geoscience projects using other disciplines such as economics, business, computer programming, social impact/input, and communication.
Poring over paper maps of northern Pakistan and looking at drainage basins and the location of earthquake epicenters could be enriched with articles on water quantity/quality or disaster response issues in that region, and how geology ties into these topics. It could open up a discussion of the ethics involved in working as a geoscientist in a post-disaster area.
The geology of the area is fascinating, too. There are crazy high erosion rates (the Indus River carries away tremendous amounts of glacial sediment) that have led to the very rapid geologic uplift of the Nanga Parbat massif, exposing young rock (~1 Ma) compared to the older bedrock ~40 Ma of the surrounding mountains. If you want some names of authors on those topics, let me know.
If you feel like digging into it, consider having the students do a small team project, starting with a dive into all sort of geoscience-related information from that area, and then narrowing in on a subject that they investigate. It's possible to do something like this using a short amount of time (spread out or not). We did so with a group of twenty community college students over about six 3-hour sessions, and they had no previous geoscience experience.
We first immersed them in information/videos/field excursions about the big flood of 2013 in Boulder, Colorado and an earlier nearby forest fire (2010) and then guided them through identifying projects and doing a simple analysis. They came up with terrific ideas like how the forest fire impacted downstream drinking water quality, and they gave short talks or digital poster presentations at the end of the program. It can be messier than we think - they found the data and did the analyses, and just needed guidance along the way.
Barb Tewksbury, I don't know if you are on this list, but maybe you could chime in about the course in which you had students look for gold in South Africa using geological information, and whether you incorporated economic or social issues. Personally, I would love to hear more from others who are running project-based, interdisciplinary courses in the geosciences.
Cheers,
Val
Valerie Sloan, Ph.D.
Director of the GEO REU Network
SOARS Center for Higher Education
NCAR|UCAR
P.O. Box 3000
Boulder, CO 80307-3000