The Semester at a Glance
Earth's Formation & Structure
How Earth formed, differentiated into layers, and how we know what's inside it.
Rocks & the Rock Cycle
Igneous, sedimentary, and metamorphic rocks, and the cycle that connects them.
Plate Tectonics
Continental drift, plate boundaries, mountain building, and earthquakes.
Volcanoes & Natural Disasters
Eruption styles and hazards, landslides, tsunamis, and geologic risk.
Surface Processes
Weathering, erosion, and deposition — how rivers, glaciers, and coasts shape the land.
Geologic Time, Fossils & Dinosaurs
Stratigraphy, the fossil record, mass extinctions, and the Mesozoic — plus your final project.
Welcome to Earth Science
Welcome in. This class is about the ground itself — how it formed, what it's made of, why it moves, and what it's been doing for the last 4.6 billion years. If you've ever wondered why a mountain is where it is, why an earthquake happens, or how we know dinosaurs existed at all, this is that class.
We move through a unit at a time — formation and structure, rocks, plate tectonics, volcanoes and disasters, surface processes, and finally geologic time and the fossil record — and you'll keep a running field notebook the whole semester so the class stays connected to real rock and real landscapes.
You don't need any prior science background coming in. Show up, get your hands on some rocks, and ask questions — that's the whole deal.
Course Documents
Grading, expectations, and how the semester is laid out.
📝The recurring rock & outcrop log you'll fill out all semester.
🗺️Every era, epoch, and mineral/rock ID concept covered this term. One page. Print it.
⭐ Print this outA Note About AI
- Generate course images
- Build the interactive tools and field-notebook templates
- Format and layout lesson content consistently
- Draft activity instructions and rubrics
This is a class about observing and understanding the real Earth, so I use AI to help build it — go ahead and use it too, especially to explore questions that go beyond what we cover in class. The line is between using AI to learn and using it to skip learning.