Curated category
Earth sciences
- PaleontologyPaleontology spends most of its time reading the dead, and it does so through fossils. The field can classify organisms, measure geologic time, and…
- GeophysicsGeophysics begins with a deceptively simple question: what is the Earth actually made of, and how does it work? In 132 AD, a Chinese inventor named Zhang…
- GeomorphologyGeomorphology is the scientific study of how Earth's surface came to look the way it does. In the 5th century BC, the Greek historian Herodotus stood at the…
- OceanographyOceanography is the scientific study of the ocean, encompassing its physics, chemistry, biology, and geology. Yet for most of human history, the ocean was…
- Earth's energy budgetEarth's energy budget describes the balance between the sunlight our planet absorbs and the heat it radiates back into space.
- Giant-impact hypothesisThe giant-impact hypothesis proposes that the Moon was born from catastrophe. About 4.5 billion years ago, a Mars-sized body slammed into a proto-Earth still…
- Global surface temperatureThe blue line on a graph represents global surface temperature reconstructed over the last 2,000 years using proxy data from tree rings, corals, and ice…
- EarthEarth is the third planet from the Sun, and the only place in the known universe where life has ever taken hold. At 4.5 billion years old, it formed from gas…
- History of lifeThe history of life on Earth begins with a planet that formed about 4.54 billion years ago, give or take 50 million. Scientists abbreviate that span as Ga…
- Ocean heat contentOcean heat content is a measure of the energy absorbed and stored by the world's oceans, and what it has been revealing over recent decades is striking.