These natural landscape scene descriptions can support student exercises that explicitly bridge earth science and creative writing. The descriptions provide significant science content anchored to specific (and often stunning) places, rather than land features in the abstract. They also provide specific examples of ways that a scene's physical character can enrich atmosphere, plot, and action in a story scene.
Let's Build a Continent! - This is an alternative discussion approach for global earth science, with connections to fiction writing, game design, and other forms of storytelling. As a whole-class or group activity, work to map out a fictional continent, applying geoscience principles from prior learning or just-in-time research. Students may have particular storytelling scenes in mind at the start, but further intriguing landscape settings will emerge as the continent takes form. Click here for a short list of continent-building concepts and tools!
Students might be given a particular scene description as basis for a story-writing prompt. This continuity of place will make for an interesting session comparing the writing products, emphasizing the different directions of story that result from a single richly described setting.
Students might access the full website to select story settings (either speculative or carried through in writing samples), reporting in either case on considerations that led them to choose particular scenes. The THEMES menu may be especially useful for students with plot lines already in mind.
An in-class projected photo album of images copied from this website could easily demonstrate the true variety of landscape scenes to be found in real deserts, or caves, or other regions, This could certainly be part of an earth science lecture, but could also provide encouragement in a writers' class to seek out more distinctive dramatic settings than the simple, default images of those regions commonly employed in our media. Scene descriptions associated with general region types are listed in the ENVIRONMENTS and ELEVATION LEVELS menus.
Then there is the possibility that your class might be able to visit and explore a natural scene such as one of these. If it is a Reference Location identified at end of one of the scene descriptions, that description provides opportunity to preview or review the scene in some detail. Visiting any other natural scene, students might be challenged as a group to collect observations and note down narrative possibilities, in the same style as one of these scene descriptions.