Follow Kentucky Through Geologic Time

This interactive shows the location of Kentucky through different geological eras of time.

Aging Diamonds?

In this video from Nature, geological detectives use ancient diamonds to learn more about Earth's inner layers.

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Build an Island

This interactive resource from NOVA Online shows how an atoll is formed from a volcanic island and describes the role coral reefs play in this process.

Caves: Extreme Conditions for Life

This video segment adapted from NOVA raises the provocative idea that if life can exist in the most extreme environments on Earth — such as in dark, toxic caves — then perhaps living things can also survive in harsh environments on other planets.

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Climate Change Impacts Alaska Glaciers

This video adapted from KTOO takes a look at Earth's warming and cooling cycles and the current atypical trend of warming that is impacting the glaciers in Alaska's Inside Passage.

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Clues from Past Climates

In this interactive produced by ThinkTV, learn how scientists discover clues to past climates that lie hidden in the natural environment, as well as in some surprising historical documents.

Comets Bombard the Early Earth

Visualize how comets carrying chemicals necessary for life could have made their way to Earth billions of years ago in this video segment adapted from NOVA.

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Comets Deliver Amino Acids to Earth

Amino acids, essential ingredients for life, may have been delivered to Earth by comets billions of years ago, as visualized in this video segment adapted from NOVA.

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Continental Drift: What's the Big Idea?

In this lesson designed to enhance literacy skills, students learn how the theory that explains the position of Earth's continents was established and later modified, and gain important insights into how science and the scientific community operate.

Dating Lava Flows on Mauna Loa Volcano, Hawaiʻi

In this video segment adapted from NOVA, scientists search for carbonized remains of plants preserved in lava flows to find out how long it has taken rain forests on Hawaiʻi to regenerate after a volcanic eruption.

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Deep-Sea Vents and Life's Origins

Deep-sea vents are home to life forms that do not rely on the Sun's energy. They depend instead on energy from volcanoes on the ocean floor. This video segment adapted from NOVA hypothesizes that life on Earth may have begun in this extreme environment.

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Deep Time

In this video a Penn State professor refers to National Park canyons carved out by water and wind as he explains “deep time” - the notion that the earth is billions of years old; another professor states how the theory of evolution is supported by evidence of an ancient Earth recorded in rocks.

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Deep Time

This interactive timeline from Evolution offers a visual representation of the major geological changes, transformations, and extinction episodes in the 4.6-billion-year history of Earth.

Diatoms Measure Climate Change

In this video segment adapted from NOVA: "Becoming Human," learn what the analysis of fossilized microscopic algae in sediment tells us about rapid changes in climate in Africa's past.

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Drilling to Antarctica’s Rock Core

In this video adapted from ANDRILL, find out how geoscientists get through more than a dozen football fields of ice and water in order to study the rock and sediment beneath Antarctica.

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Earthquake Prediction

This video segment adapted from NOVA tells the tragic story of two Japanese seismologists who disagreed about the threat of earthquakes in the early twentieth century. Today, seismologists in California offer residents a probability of risk that an earthquake might occur.

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Earthquakes: Los Angeles

In this video segment adapted from NOVA, animations are used to show how the hills around Los Angeles were formed by earthquakes at small thrust faults that extend outward from the larger San Andreas fault.

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Earthquakes: The Prehistoric Record

In this video segment adapted from NOVA, a geologist digs a trench along the San Andreas Fault to reveal three thousand years of earthquake history. Information from the layers of sediment may help geologists to predict earthquakes.

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The Falls of the Ohio

This video from KET examines one of the largest exposed fossil beds in the world, found at the Falls of the Ohio River, near Louisville, Kentucky.

Field Research on Glacial Change

In this video segment produced by ThinkTV, learn how scientists take measurements in the field to gain an overall understanding of changes in local water supplies, and how they may relate to changes in the mass of nearby glaciers.

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