The Spring Creek project series: two geology projects to be taught at the introductory level

Carleton College, Northfield Minnesota has a long history of actively transforming the landscape to provide recreation, utility, and aesthetics to the campus. Two major projects undertaken by the college were the creations of Lyman Lakes in 1916 and Bell Athletic field in 1927. Both of these projects involved reworking the route of Spring Creek, the small creek then running through campus. The creation of Lyman Lakes required dredging a wetland and the creation of Bell Field required digging a new route for a section of the creek. Sometime after the creation of these areas, the water quality of the creek began to decline. Problems included overloading of key nutrients, increases in turbidity, and eutrophication. The reasons for this decline in water quality have been attributed to various sources, primarily: storm water runoff, septic tank leakage, and fertilizer leaching. In order to analyze the possible loading contributions of Bell Field and Lyman Lakes, two projects were created to explore their nutrient systems. Both projects include: learning about nutrient cycles, researching relevant papers, doing field work, making spatial maps of nutrient concentrations, and writing a final report on the dynamics of the system studied. The finalized course schemas for each project were placed on the Carleton College geology website for teachers and students to access