Issues in Earth Science

In our issue 20 story, A True Original by Mary Ibe, young urban explorer LaRose helps her county solve a real environmental geochemistry puzzle when she collects samples of shrimp chimneys and sends them in for analysis.

Read the story in Fiction for the Classroom.

The accompanying teacher resources provide problems and challenges in statistical analysis appropriate for a middle or high school classroom (and they don't require complicated math!)

Stories for IES appear in Fiction for the Classroom.  Teacher resources for middle and high school earth science classes are included.

A few essays on earth science and teaching can be found in past issues of Topics for Debate.

Get your copy of Learning to Read the Earth and Sky--a book especially for science teachers or anyone interested in the nature of earth science investigation and the philosophy of investigative education.

Check out the free online self-guided course materials with lectures, practice puzzles, and feedback at Earth Science for Teachers, including an advanced refresher course for science teachers or others interested in earth science.

Interested in fun brain puzzles?

Help Alwan Stagor hide from the Empire, and engage in other adventure puzzles, in our Earth Science Challenge. 

Find additional earth science challenges and puzzles at Russ Colson's Science Fiction and Earth Science Instagram page.

This website is dedicated to raising awareness of the science of our world and our place in it.  It provides essays, challenges, a forum for discussion, and fictional stories related to the Earth and Space Sciences along with science activities for the middle and high school classroom.

More than any other science, Earth and Space Science is about what happens around us every day, the sky that we see above, the weather that we experience, the land that we walk on. Yet most American's know less about Earth Science, and have more misconceptions about it, than any other science.

The Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS, 2013) have reaffirmed the importance of Earth and Space Science for all students, as was already affirmed by the NGSS predecessor, The National Science Education Standards (1996). Even so, in the United States, Earth Science is rarely taught at the high school level and remains one of the least understood of all the sciences. Even in science fiction, Earth Science is typically relegated to the backdrop, the deadly volcano that erupts wherever it's convenient, the cave to the Earth's core, the weather that can change into a deadly killer in an instant.

We want to change all that! Join us in exploring the universe around us!