GEOITALIA 2013 – WORKSHOP W1

Venturini C. , Pasquarè F. (2013) - A new conceptual grid for Earth Science communication: ‘formed, deformed, moulded’

Keywords: sustainable, conceptual, grid

Earth Sciences offer unimaginable inspiration to those interested in science education and popularization. However it is often hard trying to describe the evolution, through geological time, of a given territory. This is especially due to the superposition, in the same area, of multiple effects related to quite different processes.

With the purpose of ensuring sustainable information – i.e. to provide contents that are easily understandable by the lay public – such complicated concepts need to be simplified without being trivialized.

This goal can be pursued through the elaboration and use of a conceptual grid capable of tying together different, multidisciplinary information. The grid has be able to split all crustal phenomena into a few (no more than three), well understandable, sets of effects.

As the use of technical jargon borrowed from geology, such as litho-, tecto- and morphogenesis needs to be avoided, we propose to describe all processes related to the formation of rocks, their deformation and successive erosion, by means of a combination of concepts related to the following words: formed, deformed and moulded.

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