Hydrology follows water after it leaves the sky: up into the air by evaporation, down into aquifers, along rivers, into flood plains and into the statistics engineers use to plan for it. These eight scientists each...
8 stops
Mist, fog and haze all cut visibility, but they differ in what hangs in the air and why. This path starts with the water droplets of mist and fog, follows fog to coasts and deserts where it matters, then turns to the...
11 stops
Plates pull apart, slide past one another, dive beneath one another and collide, and the crust shows each motion in stone. This path follows eight formations in the order of the forces behind them, from a rift opening...
8 stops
Granite crystallizes slowly underground, and every stop on this path is a body of it that erosion, ice or weathering later uncovered. Each stop shows a different way of shaping the same kind of rock: peeling domes...
12 stops
This trail starts with the sinking air of the polar highs and the way high pressure forms, then follows cold air as it gets cut off aloft, spreads out across the ground and sweeps over whole regions. It ends with stormy...
10 stops
Minerals were first collected as curiosities, then measured, then explained by the atoms that make them. This path follows fourteen mineralogists and crystallographers from a Renaissance court physician born in 1550 to...
14 stops
This trail follows rock that has been changed without being melted away: mud that is squeezed into slate and schist, basalt that is carried down into a subduction zone, and rock that is baked, flooded with fluids or...
11 stops
This trail follows fourteen shifts in Earth's climate and air from the first rise of free oxygen about 2.4 billion years ago to the cold centuries of the Little Ice Age. The stops run in time order, so a reader can...
14 stops
The sea shapes a coastline by attacking its weak points, and the ten formations on this path show the results in order: chalk cliffs that retreat as a wall, then limestone and volcanic headlands cut into stacks and...
10 stops
In the 1950s and 1960s, magnetism preserved in rock and ocean floor turned continental drift from a doubted idea into plate tectonics. This path follows that evidence from the first rock magnetometers, through the...
8 stops
This path follows water and air through the atmosphere, starting with the sun lifting water from the surface and ending with the floods that fall where moisture is delivered in excess. In between it shows how mountains...
12 stops
Earth's climate has a past that can be measured and a present that can be changed. These ten scientists read that story from orbital geometry, deep sea sediment, polar ice, trace gases and temperature records, and the...
10 stops
Karst is what slightly acidic water does to soluble rock over millions of years. This path follows it from landscapes carved at the surface, through pinnacles and drowned towers, down into caves cut by underground...
10 stops
This trail follows sunlight through the atmosphere of Earth, from the scattering that makes a daytime sky blue, through the ice and water effects that draw halos and colors around the Sun, to the twilight glows and the...
14 stops
This path follows twelve scientists in the order of their birth years, from John Wesley Powell in 1834 to Maurice Krafft in 1946, and each stop adds one fact its own page records about the work. Together they show the...
12 stops
These eight scientists worked out what the solid Earth does and what lies inside it, moving from the fault that breaks in an earthquake, through the sinking plates and the layered interior, to the magnetic stripes that...
8 stops
These nine formations show how layered sandstone and other soft rock are shaped into cliffs, canyons, arches and domes by wind, flood, frost and uplift. The path begins in the sandstone country of Arizona and Utah, then...
9 stops
Nobody could read the age of the Earth directly, so it had to be worked out in steps. This path follows nine scientists in rough order of the ideas they added: layers that record time, a rival theory that was later set...
9 stops
This trail follows the people who learned to measure, forecast and explain the atmosphere and the oceans, in the order their key work appeared, from a wind scale for sailors in 1805 to a Nobel Prize for climate...
14 stops
These eleven earthquakes, from 1556 to 2015, show how one planetary process produces very different human catastrophes depending on ground, buildings, fire, tsunami and landslide. Read in date order, the path also shows...
11 stops
This trail follows twelve events in the order they happened, from the three mass extinctions tied to volcanism and impact, through an abrupt climate reversal and a prehistoric tsunami, to earthquakes, a hurricane and a...
12 stops
These nine formations all begin as volcanic rock and end as landmarks shaped by cooling, erosion or slumping. The path moves from lava that cracked into columns, to volcanic throats left standing, to ash carved into...
9 stops
This path follows eight eruptions in order of date, from the burial of Pompeii in 79 to the lava that filled Kapoho Bay in 2018. Each stop shows a different way a volcano reaches people: by burying a town, by darkening...
8 stops
This path follows ten scientists across roughly two centuries as geology moved from mapping rock layers to explaining why continents and ocean basins move. It begins with the first maps and fossil-based dating of...
10 stops
From a molten, airless Hadean Earth to the ice age climate cycle we are still living inside of: the founding wave's own path through deep time, deep rock and the earthquake that changed how the planet is measured.
8 stops
How geologists learned to read time in stone: six stops from a Danish anatomist's simple rule about flat-lying sediment to the calibrated calendar of the geologic time scale. This is the trust-and-methodology story of...
6 stops
A walk through the whole geologic time scale, eon by period by epoch, from Earth's molten beginning to the epoch we live in now.
9 stops