Physical Geology

Explore the value of geology as the study of the earth, underpinning energy, resources, and materials, waste management, and environmental solutions, while examining earth materials, processes, and history.

Trace the history of geology from ancient Greek thinkers through medieval scholars to modern concepts like uniformitarianism, the rock cycle, fossil succession, and continental drift shaping oil geology.

Explore the vast scale of the universe and earth's place in the solar system, the sun's dominance, eight planets, dwarf planets, and other bodies explained by nebular theory.

Explore the Moon's status as Earth's largest satellite, its mass, gravity, temperature swings, and interior core, plus surface features like maria and highlands, rocks, and the giant impact origin.

Explore terrestrial planets—the four inner worlds Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars—sharing earth-like, silica-rich composition and thin atmospheres, with Mercury’s 88-day year, Venus’s thick CO2 atmosphere, and Mars’s wind-eroded surface.

Explore geological dating to understand earth history through rock records, fossils, and the geological time scale, distinguishing numerical dating from relative dating.

Explore how relative dating orders past events by applying principles such as superposition, original horizontals, lateral continuity, cross-cutting relationships, inclusions, and conformity, including angular and nonconformities.

Numerical dating determines a rock or fossil’s age by measuring radioactive parent-daughter isotopes and half-lives, such as carbon-14, rubidium-87, and uranium systems, with the oldest rock at 4.28 billion years.

Explore the evolution of continental drift, from fixed continents to Wagener’s hypothesis, supported by identical fossils across distant continents, matching mountain belts, and paleoclimate clues that point to Pangaea.

Explore how mountains form through collision of crustal bodies, including cordillera-type and alpine-type belts, and through fault-block, tension-driven uplift. Examples include the Himalayas, Alps, Appalachians, and basin-and-range landscapes.

Investigate how isostasy and mantle convection shape the earth's topography, and learn to interpret topographic maps with contour lines reflecting elevation and slope.

Explore the processes of mechanical weathering that break rocks into smaller pieces, including frost wedging, unloading, thermal expansion, salt crystal growth, biological activity, and abrasion.

Explore chemical weathering, where rocks break down through solution, oxidation, and hydrolysis, and distinguish dissolution by water from hydrolysis with rust and acid interactions.

Explain how corners weather faster because they are attacked in three directions, edges in two, and faces in one, driving spheroidal weathering that turns rocks into sphere-like forms.

Learn how deserts are dry lands where precipitation wanes below evaporation, and explore arid and semi-arid regions and desert types like subtropical, rainshadow, coastal, continental interior, polar, and extraterrestrial.

Sediments transform into sedimentary rocks through diagenesis in the upper crust under heat and pressure, with lithification—cementation by calcite, silica, or iron oxide—and compaction that reduces porosity.