Category: Global Systems Science
Online curriculum books for high school science pertinent to key societal issues
LC8C. Stay Current—Highs and Lows Over the Past 750 Million Years
Staying current for Chapter 8 See non-chronological resources (bottom of this page) { Life and Climate Contents } 2023-07-12. Massive lava outburst may have led to Snowball Earth. [https://www.science.org/content/article/massive-lava-outburst-may-have-led-snowball-earth] By Maia Wei-Haas, Science. Excerpt: About 717 million years ago, a climate catastrophe struck the planet, as temperatures plunged and glaciers enveloped the globe. The cause […]
LC7C. Stay Current—Earth’s Shifting Crust
Stay current for chapter 7 { Life and Climate Contents } 2024-08-26. Near-Identical Dinosaur Tracks On Separate Continents Reveal Seismic Split 140 Million Years Ago. By Francesca Benson, IFLSCIENCE. Excerpt: racks of near-identical dinosaur prints have been found across two continents, demonstrating how the dinosaurs that made them 120 million years ago were among the last to […]
LC6C. Stay Current—How and When Did Complex Life Begin?
Stay current for chapter 6 { Life and Climate Contents } Understanding Evolution – a one-stop source for information on evolution.2019-11-14. Alien genes from bacteria helped plants conquer the land. By Elizabeth Pennisi, Science Magazine. 2024-03-07. Peering into the past to identify the species most at risk from climate change. [https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adj5763] By Erin Saupe, Cooper Malanoski, et al, […]
LC5C. Stay Current—The Origin of Our Oxygen-Rich Atmosphere
Stay current for chapter 5 { Life and Climate Contents } 2021-09-03. Longer Days Likely Boosted Earth’s Early Oxygen. Source: By Damond Benningfield, Eos/AGU. Excerpt: Microbial mats in a Lake Huron sinkhole, combined with modeling work, suggest that the changing length of Earth’s day could have played a key role in oxygenating the atmosphere.… [https://eos.org/articles/longer-days-likely-boosted-earths-early-oxygen] […]
LC4C. Stay Current—The Beginning of Life on Earth
Stay current for chapter 4 { Life and Climate Contents } 2024-07-12. Our last common ancestor lived 4.2 billion years ago—perhaps hundreds of millions of years earlier than thought. By ROBERT F. SERVICE, Science. Excerpt: The last ancestor shared by all living organisms was a microbe that lived 4.2 billion years ago, had a fairly […]
LC3C. Stay Current—How Do Scientists Play the Dating Game?
Stay current for chapter 3 { Life and Climate Contents } 2009 June 7. Early rocks to reveal their ages. By Jennifer Carpenter, BBC News. Excerpt: A new technique has been helping scientists piece together how the Earth’s continents were arranged 2.5 billion years ago. The novel method allows scientists to recover rare minerals from rocks. By […]
LC2C. Stay Current—Where Does Earth’s Atmosphere Come From?
Staying current with chapter 2 { Life and Climate Contents } 2016-05-09. Earth’s ancient atmosphere was half as thick as it is today. By Roland Pease, Science. Excerpt: …very little is known about how thick Earth’s ancient atmosphere once was. Now, a new study suggests that Earth’s atmosphere 2.7 billion years ago was between a quarter to […]
LC13. What Does Earth’s Past Tell Us About Our Future?
Chapter 13 { Life and Climate Contents } In Life and Climate we have seen how Earth’s changing climate and evolving life forms have influenced each other over the past 4.6 billion years of our planet’s history. In the first part of this chapter we briefly review highlights of this fascinating story. In the last […]
LC12. Climate and Culture
Chapter 12 { Life and Climate Contents } I. New Ways of Living and Thinking Although anatomically modern human beings had evolved by 100,000 years ago, there is little evidence that they lived and behaved differently from Homo erectus. However, evidence shows that major changes were beginning to get under way about 50,000 years ago. […]
LC11. Climate and Human Evolution
Chapter 11 { Life and Climate Contents } Paleoanthropologists—scientists who study the physical evolution of humans—call our species Homo sapiens. This means that we are part of a category of individuals who share common characteristics, the genus Homo, and that within that genus our group or species is called “sapiens.” Fossil evidence shows that there […]