Unpacked Content
Scientific and Engineering Practices
Constructing Explanations and Designing Solutions
Crosscutting Concepts
Scale, Proportion, and Quantity
Knowledge
Students:
- The planet's systems interact over scales that range from microscopic to global in size, and they operate over fractions of a second to billions of years. These interactions have shaped Earth's history and will determine its future.
- Processes change Earth's surface at time and spatial scales that can be large (such as slow plate motions or the uplift of large mountain ranges) or small (such as rapid landslides or microscopic geochemical reactions).
- Many geologic processes that change Earth's features (such as earthquakes, volcanoes, and meteor impacts) usually behave gradually but are punctuated by catastrophic events.
- The composition of Earth's layers and their properties affect the surface of Earth.
- Geologic processes that have changed Earth's features include events like surface weathering, erosion, and deposition by the movements of water, ice, and wind.
- Surface weathering, erosion, movement, and the deposition of sediment range from large to microscopic scales (e.g., sediment consisting of boulders and microscopic grains of sand, raindrops dissolving microscopic amounts of minerals).
- Water's movements—both on the land and underground—cause weathering and erosion, which change the land's surface features and create underground formations.
- The motion of the Earth's plates produces changes on a planetary scale over a range of time periods from millions to billions of years. Evidence for the motion of plates can explain large-scale features of the Earth's surface (e.g., mountains, distribution of continents) and how they change.
- Catastrophic changes can modify or create surface features over a very short period of time compared to other geologic processes, and the results of those catastrophic changes are subject to further changes over time by processes that act on longer time scales (e.g., erosion of a meteor crater).
Skills
Students are able to:
- Articulate a statement that relates a given phenomenon to a scientific idea, including that geologic processes have shaped the Earth's history over widely varying scales of space and time.
- Identify the corresponding timescales for each identified geoscience process.
- Identify and use multiple valid and reliable sources of evidence to construct an explanation that changes occur on very large or small spatial and/or temporal scales.
- Use reasoning to connect the evidence and support an explanation for how geologic processes have changed the Earth's surface at a variety of temporal and spatial scales.
Understanding
Students understand that:
- The planet's systems interact over scales that range from microscopic to global in size, and they operate over fractions of a second to billions of years. These interactions have shaped Earth's history and will determine its future.
- A given surface feature is the result of a broad range of geoscience processes occurring at different temporal and spatial scales.
- Surface features will continue to change in the future as geoscience processes continue to occur.
Vocabulary
- Evidence
- Geology
- Geologic process
- Scale
- System
- Microscopic
- Global
- Time scale
- Spatial scale
- Uplift
- Landslide
- Geochemical reaction
- Earthquake
- Catastrophic event
- Composition
- Property
- Deposition
- Sediment
- Surface features
- Underground formations
- Erosion
- Chemical erosion
- Physical erosion
- Tectonic plates
- Tectonic plate processes
- Continent
- Continental drift theory
- Volcano
- Volcanic eruption
- Meteor
- Meteor impact
- Impact crater
- Weathering
- Fault line
- Cavern
