My Science Box

Students get an introduction to the San Francisco Bay watershed by studying a map of California. The concept of a watershed is solidified using the San Francisco Bay watershed as ...

What's the big deal about rocks? They don't move, aren't flashy, and seem pretty useless to the untrained eye. To discover the beauty of rocks, one must look closer and ...

The study of rock layers, or stratigraphy, is a natural way to introduce students to the fundamental principles of geology and to lead into the idea of geologic time. In ...

Kilauea Crater, Hawaii Pu'u 'O'o crater at dusk. Image courtesy of USGS.Starting with an earthquake epicenter map (generated by students in The Big One activity), students add information about where ...

What drives the motion of the Earth’s tectonic plates? Partly, it is convection, the process by which heat energy is transferred by currents in a liquid or gas. Convection currents ...

Students take what they know about earthquake, volcano and mid-ocean ridge distributions (The Big One and Plate Patterns) and put it together with what they know about convection in the ...