1. Properties of earth materials

2. Objects in the sky

3. Changes in earth and sky

1. Earth materials are solid rocks and soils, water, and the gases of the atmosphere. The varied materials have different physical and chemical properties, which make them useful in different ways, for example, as building materials, as sources of fuel or for growing the plants we use as food. Earth materials provide many of the resources that humans use.

2. Soils have properties of color and texture, capacity to retain water, and ability to support the growth of many kinds of plants, including those for our food supply.

3. Fossils provide evidence about the plants and animals that lived long ago and the nature of the environment at that time.

1. The sun, moon, stars, clouds, birds, and airplanes all have properties, locations and movements that can be observed and described.

2. The sun provides the light and heat necessary to maintain the
   temperature of earth.

1. The surface of the earth changes. Some changes are due to slow processes, such as erosion and weathering, and some changes are due to rapid processes, such as landslides, volcanic eruptions, and earthquakes.

2. Weather changes from day to day and over the seasons. Weather can be described by measurable quantities, such as temperature, wind direction and speed, and precipitation.

3. Objects in the sky have patterns of movement. The sun, for example, appears to move across the sky in the same way everyday, but its path changes slowly over the seasons. The moon moves across the sky on a daily basis much like the sun. The observable shape of the moon changes from day to day in a cycle that lasts about a month.

1. Structure of earth's system

2. Earth's history

3. Earth in the solar system

1. The solid earth is layered with a lithosphere; hot, convecting mantle; and dense, metallic core.

2. Lithospheric plates on the scales of continents and oceans constantly move at rates of centimeters per year in response to movements in the mantle. Major geological events, such as earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and mountain building, results from these plate motions.

3. Land forms are the result of a combination of constructive and destructive forces. Constructive forces include crustal deformation, volcanic eruption, and deposition of sediment. Destructive forces include weathering and erosion.

4. Some changes in the solid earth can be described as the "rock cycle." Old rocks at the earth's surface weather, forming sediments that are buried, then compacted, heated, and often recrystallized into new rock. Eventually, those new rocks may be brought to the surface by the forces that drive plate motions, and the rock cycle continues.

5. Soil consists of weathered rocks and decomposed organic material from dead plants, animals, and bacteria. Soils are often found in layers, with each having a different chemical composition and texture.

6. Water, which covers the majority of the earth's surface, circulates through the crust, oceans, and atmosphere in what is known as the "water cycle." Water evaporates from the earth's surface, rises and cools as it moves to higher elevations, condenses as rain or snow, and falls to the surface where it collects in lakes, oceans, soil, and in rocks underground.

7. Water is solvent. As it passes through the water cycle it dissolves minerals and gases and carries them to the oceans.

8. The atmosphere is a mixture of nitrogen, oxygen, and trace gases that include water vapor. The atmosphere has different properties at different elevations.

9. Clouds, formed by the condensation of water vapor, affect weather and climate.

10. Global patterns of atmospheric movement influence local weather. Oceans have a major effect on climate, because water in the oceans holds a large amount of heat.

11. Living organisms have played many roles in the earth system, including affecting the composition of the atmosphere, producing some types of rocks, and contributing to the weathering of rocks.

1. Earth's processes we see today, including erosion, movement of lithospheric plates, and changes in atmospheric composition, are similar to those that occurred in the past. Earth's history is also influenced by occasional catastrophes, such as the impact of an asteroid or comet.

2. Fossils provide important evidence of how life and environmental conditions have changed.

1. Earth is the third planet from the sun in a system that includes the moon, the sun, eight other planets and their moons, and smaller objects, such as asteroids and comets. The sun, an average star, is the central and largest body in the solar system.

2. Most objects in the solar system are in regular and predictable motion. Those motions explain such phenomena as the day, the year, phases of the moon, and eclipses.

3. Gravity is the force that keeps planets in orbit around the sun and governs the rest of the motion in the solar system. Gravity alone holds us to the earth's surface and explains the phenomena of the tides.

4. The sun is the major source of energy for phenomena on the earth's surface, such as growth of plants, winds, ocean currents, and the water cycle. Seasons result from variations in the amount of the sun's energy hitting the surface, due to the tilt of earth's rotation on its axis and the length of the day.

1. Energy in the earth system

2. Geochemical cycles

3. Origin and evolution of the earth system

4. Origin and evolution of the universe

1. Earth systems have internal and external sources of energy, both of which create heat. The sun is the major external source of energy. Two primary sources of internal energy are the decay of radioactive isotopes and the gravitational energy from Earth's original formation.

2. The outward transfer of earth's internal heat drives convection circulation in the mantle that propels the plates comprising earth's surface across the face of the globe.

3. Heating of earth's surface and atmosphere by the sun drives convection within the atmosphere and oceans, producing winds and ocean currents.

4. Global climate is determined by energy transfer from the sun at and near earth's surface. This energy transfer is influenced by dynamic processes such as cloud cover and earth's rotation, and static conditions such as the position of mountain ranges and oceans.

1. Earth is a system containing essentially a fixed amount of each stable chemical atom or element. Each element can exist in several different chemical reservoirs. Each element on earth moves among reservoirs in the solid earth, oceans, atmosphere, and organisms as part of geochemical cycles.

2. Movement of matter between reservoirs is driven by earth's internal and external sources of energy. These movements are often accompanied by a change in the physical and chemical properties of the matter. Carbon, for example, occurs in carbonate rocks such as limestone, in the atmosphere as carbon dioxide, and in all organisms as complex molecules that control the chemistry of life.

1. The sun, earth, and the rest of the solar system formed from nebular cloud of dust and gas 4.6 billion years ago. The early Earth was very different from the planet we live on today.

2. Geologic time can be estimated by observing rock sequences and using fossils to correlate the sequences at various locations. Current methods include using the known decay rates of radioactive isotopes present in rocks to measure the time since the rock was formed.

3. Interactions among the solid earth, the oceans, the atmosphere, and organisms have resulted in the ongoing evolution of the earth system. We can observe some changes such as earthquakes and volcanic eruptions on a human time scale, but many processes such as mountain building and plate movements take place over hundreds of millions of years.

4. Evidence for one-celled forms of life, the bacteria extends back more than 3.5 billion years. The evolution of life caused dramatic changes in the composition of earth's atmosphere, which did not originally contain oxygen.

1. The origin of the universe remains one of the greatest questions in science. The "big bang" theory places the origin between 10 and 20 billion years ago, when the universe began in a hot dense state; according to this theory, the universe has been expanding ever since.

2. Early in the history of the universe, matter, primarily the light atoms hydrogen and helium, clumped together by gravitational attraction to form countless trillions of stars. Billions of galaxies, each of which is a gravitationally bound cluster of billions of stars, now form most of the visible mass in the universe.

3. Stars produce energy from nuclear reactions, primarily the fusion of hydrogen to form helium. These and other processes in stars have led to the formation of all the other elements.