Back-of-the-Envelope Calculations: The Scale of the Atmosphere part of Activity Collection
Question Let's imagine a scale model of the Earth and use a basketball to represent the Earth. Now, let's get ourselves some packages of fruit roll-ups and start covering the basketball with layers of ...

Back-of-the-Envelope Calculations: Energy Released in an Earthquake part of Activity Collection
Question A magnitude 8.5 earthquake (such as the 1964 Good Friday earthquake in Alaska) releases about 1x1018 joules of energy. The atomic bomb exploded over Hiroshima released about 1.5x1013 joules of energy. How ...

The Earth's Shells - Density vs. Depth part of Activity Collection
In this module, students are asked to devise a way of graphically plotting the density variations with depth in the Earth.

Question of the Day: ANWR Drilling Policy part of Activity Collection
Students analyze the interplay between science and politics on the issue of drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

STELLA Systems Modeling part of Activity Collection
Use STELLA to model an aquifer/ground-water-contaminant system.

BotEC: The Himalayas and Continental Drift part of Activity Collection
Queston: The story of the Himalayas can be traced back to the breakup of the supercontinent, called Pangaea, about 200 million years ago, when India began its rapid movement northward towards Asia. Asia was a much ...

BotEC: The Magnitude of the India-Asia Collision part of Activity Collection
Question: The story of the Himalayas can be traced back to the breakup of the supercontinent, called Pangaea, about 200 million years ago, when India began its rapid movement northward towards Asia. Asia was a much ...

BotEC: The Magnitude of Geologic Time part of Activity Collection
Question The oldest rock yet to be found on the earth is from Canada and is radiometrically dated at 3.8 billion years old. Various lines of evidence suggest that the earth is about 4.5 to 5 billion years old. A ...

Environmental Footprint part of Activity Collection
This activity has students do a web-based environmental footprint quiz and integrate their results into a class mean. The students compare their results by creating a bar graph and do some simple calculations to see how much of the Earth just the population of the US requires.

Determining Dinosaur Speeds part of Activity Collection
Introduce students to concepts of dimensinal analysis by determining how fast a dinosaur was moving based on the tracks it made.