Students will examine a 2014-2015 El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) event to identify relationships among sea surface height, sea surface temperature, precipitation, and wind vectors.

Students observe seasonal images of Monthly Leaf Area, looking for any changes that are occurring throughout the year.

Our Earth is a dynamic system with diverse subsystems that interact in complex ways. Questions that scientists have about the Earth as a System may include the following. As you learn more about the Earth System, reflect on these questions. 

The Earth System Poster activity walks learners through global patterns and illuminates how each of the spheres is interconnected across the world. We will divide into small groups to look at maps of different parts of the earth system that have been observed by NASA satellites.

In this activity, students will analyze a NASA sea surface height model of El Niño for December 27, 2015, and answer questions. Then they will be instructed to create a model of their own made from pudding to reflect the layers of El Niño.

A system is an organized group of related components that work together to carry out functions that the individual parts cannot do alone.  The Earth System, like the human body system, are similar in that they comprise diverse parts that interact in complex ways.

Review this page to learn about the background of volcanoes and their eruptions.

A kinesthetic activity that challenges students to participate in a model that describes the fate of solar energy as it enters the Earth system.  A good initial lesson for Earth’s energy budget, students unravel the benefits and limitations of their model.

For over 20 years, satellite instruments have measured the sea surface height of our ever-changing oceans.  This video of images shows the complicated patterns of rising and falling ocean levels across the globe from 1993 to 2015.

Students construct explanations about Earth’s energy budget by connecting a model with observations from side-by-side animations of the monthly mapped data showing incoming and outgoing shortwave radiation from Earth’s surface.