Earth Science
Earth's layers, plate tectonics, weather, oceans, and the sky above it all, taught as the NGSS Earth and Space Science framework, animated.
16 units · 109 topics · 452 questions
What Earth is actually made of on the inside, and the geophysical clues that revealed it, since nobody has ever drilled anywhere close.
Earth's Layers by Composition · Earth's Layers by Physical Behavior · How Earth Differentiated Into Layers · Earth's Magnetic Field and the Dynamo
The evidence that convinced geologists the continents move, and the three boundary types where moving plates build every mountain range and volcanic arc.
Continental Drift: Wegener's Evidence · Seafloor Spreading and Magnetic Striping · The Theory of Plate Tectonics · Divergent Boundaries · +5 more
How rock breaks and releases energy as waves you can track across the planet, including the shadow zone that revealed a liquid core nobody had seen.
What Causes Earthquakes: Elastic Rebound · P Waves and S Waves · Surface Waves and Ground Shaking · Locating an Earthquake's Epicenter · +3 more
Why magma forms at all, what decides whether an eruption oozes or explodes, and how a volcano's shape reveals the tectonic setting underneath it.
Why Magma Forms and Rises · Magma Composition and Eruption Style · Shield Volcanoes · Composite Volcanoes and Cinder Cones · +2 more
What actually makes something a mineral, and the handful of physical tests geologists use to identify one out in the field.
What Makes a Mineral a Mineral · Crystal Structure and Atomic Arrangement · Identifying Minerals: Hardness, Streak, Cleavage · Silicate vs Nonsilicate Minerals
The three rock families and the cycle that keeps shuffling material between them, melting, cooling, breaking, and squeezing it around forever.
The Rock Cycle as a System · Igneous Rocks: Cooling Rate and Texture · Sedimentary Rocks: Compaction and Cementation · Metamorphic Rocks: Heat and Pressure · +1 more
How rock breaks down where it sits, how the pieces get carried off and dropped somewhere new, and the soil that forms out of the whole process.
Mechanical (Physical) Weathering · Chemical Weathering · How Weathering Rate Depends on Climate · Erosion by Water: Streams and Rivers · +6 more
How geologists read a rock's age from where it sits and from the atoms decaying inside it, and what the fossil record shows about life through deep time.
Relative Dating: The Law of Superposition · Relative Dating: Cross-Cutting Relationships · Relative Dating: Unconformities · Putting Relative Dating Together in One Rock Sequence · +7 more
What Earth's air is actually made of and how it's layered by temperature, from the ground you breathe on up to the edge of space.
Composition of Earth's Atmosphere · Layers of the Atmosphere · Atmospheric Pressure · Solar Radiation and the Atmosphere's Energy Budget
Why the sky does what it does day to day: humidity condensing into clouds, air masses colliding at fronts, and storms forming when conditions turn violent.
Humidity and Cloud Formation · Types of Clouds and What They Predict · Air Masses · Warm Fronts and Cold Fronts · +5 more
How weather averaged over decades sorts the planet into climate zones, and the geologic evidence showing how and why that climate has already changed.
What Makes Climate Different From Weather · Latitude and Climate Zones · What Causes Global Wind Belts · How Mountains and Oceans Shape Regional Climate · +3 more
Water's endless loop between ocean, air, and land, and the hidden reservoir moving slowly underground beneath your feet.
The Water Cycle · Groundwater and the Water Table · Aquifers and Wells · How Caves and Sinkholes Form
The seafloor's own geography, the currents that move heat and water around the globe, and what waves, tides, and coastlines are actually doing.
Ocean Basins and the Seafloor · Ocean Currents: Surface Circulation · Deep Ocean Currents: Thermohaline Circulation · Waves: How They Form and Break · +2 more
The three-body geometry behind the sky's most familiar sights: why the Moon changes shape, why eclipses are rare, and why the seasons happen at all.
Why the Moon Shows Phases · The Moon's Synchronous Rotation and the Far Side · Why Eclipses Don't Happen Every Month · Solar Eclipses · +3 more
The Sun, the eight planets, and the debris left over from their formation, all moving under the same law of gravity.
The Sun: Structure and Energy Source · The Inner Rocky Planets · The Outer Gas and Ice Giants · How the Solar System Formed · +2 more
How a star is born, burns, and dies depending on its mass, and how galaxies, an expanding universe, and the Big Bang scale that story up to everything there is.
How Stars Form From Nebulae · What Powers a Star: Nuclear Fusion · The Hertzsprung-Russell Diagram · Main Sequence Stars and Stellar Mass · +6 more