Earth Science
Examining Earth's environmental processes
Earth Science focuses on study of the physical aspects of the natural environment. Students explore the geologic processes that shape the Earth, the atmospheric and oceanic processes that govern global and local climate, and the hydrological processes that cycle water around the globe. Earth Science examines environmental process on a range of time scales, from the fractions of a second required for rapid chemical transformations to the billions of years in which the solid Earth has evolved. By learning about the history of the Earths development, students gain a valuable new content that helps them understand the behavior of the Earth as a system. The study of the Earth as a system emphasizes the interactions between the physical world and the biosphere, including the effects the physical environment has on human society and the impacts human society has wrought upon the physical world.
