How the Solid Earth Functions
Earth as a system, plate tectonics, the rock record, geologic time, and geologic hazards.
Investigate a changing planet
OnRamps Geoscience
Our classroom home for investigating Earth materials, interconnected systems, deep time, and the processes that shape our planet.
Geoscience field guide
Four ideas connect every exploration
This collection is built for useful media, trusted links, interactive investigations, and games.
How the Fluid Earth Functions
The water cycle, groundwater, rivers, ocean and atmospheric circulation, climate, and feedback loops.
How Humans Interact with the Earth
Earth resources, sustainability, stewardship, climate change, and scientific debate.
How Life on Earth Evolved
Earth and life origins, change through time, extinction, and population growth.
A more playful way to learn
Science missions and badges
Students can complete playable missions connected to course units, demonstrate what they learned, and earn a growing collection of science badges.
- 1Explore the media
- 2Complete a challenge
- 3Earn the badge
Choose an expedition
Explore Geoscience by unit
Open a unit to preview the ideas you can explore. Videos, links, visuals, and game missions appear directly with their matching unit.
Unit0
Start exploring
Meet Geoscience
What you can explore
- Questions geoscientists investigate
- Careers across the geosciences
- How observations, evidence, models, and data reveal Earth processes
Resources for this unit will appear here as they are added.
Unit1
How the Solid Earth Functions
Solid Earth
What you can explore
- Geoscience methods, geologic time, and the geologic timescale
- Rock identification and classification
- Earth's interior, seismic evidence, and magnetic field
Resources for this unit will appear here as they are added.
Unit2
How the Solid Earth Functions
Plate Tectonics
What you can explore
- Evidence, driving forces, and boundary types in plate tectonics
- Earthquakes, volcanoes, deformation, and geologic hazards
- Plate-motion rates, hot spots, maps, models, and cross sections
Resources for this unit will appear here as they are added.
Unit3
How the Solid Earth Functions + How Life on Earth Evolved
Geological Time
What you can explore
- Sedimentary rocks, structures, environments, and stratigraphic principles
- Relative dating, radiometric decay, and absolute ages
- Evolution of life, fossils, diversity curves, and mass extinctions
Resources for this unit will appear here as they are added.
Unit4
How the Fluid Earth Functions
Earth's Surface
What you can explore
- Rivers, sediment transport, flooding, and flood-hazard analysis
- Aquifers, groundwater resources, and contamination threats
- Terraces, coasts, glaciers, erosion, and mass wasting
Resources for this unit will appear here as they are added.
Unit5
How the Fluid Earth Functions
Oceans and Climate
What you can explore
- Ocean and atmospheric circulation, energy balance, and hurricanes
- ENSO, paleoclimate evidence, Milankovitch cycles, and feedback loops
- Ice-core and carbon-dioxide data, greenhouse gases, and climate change
Resources for this unit will appear here as they are added.
Unit6
How Humans Interact with the Earth
Living with the Planet
What you can explore
- Fossil fuels, hydraulic fracturing, induced seismicity, and energy data
- Renewable energy, minerals, mining, and environmental impacts
- Carbon cycling, climate solutions, population growth, and sustainability
Unit7
Earth in space
Space Science
What you can explore
- Origin and evolution of the universe and evidence for the Big Bang
- Formation of the solar system, Earth, and the Moon
- Characteristics of planets in the solar system
Resources for this unit will appear here as they are added.