The history of volcanoes, like most scientific knowledge, didn’t come nicely packed in one episode, or with the acceptance of a single author’s point of view. Rather, the process required a lot of exploration, argumentation and publication over many years. In this story, we’re going to examine how naturalists went about studying volcanoes from 1760-1840.

Galileo’s pendulum laws, developed in the early seventeenth century, were one of the foundations of modern science. Christiaan Huygens later refined Galileo’s pendulum laws and was the first to use these refined laws in creating a pendulum clock. The construction of an accurate pendulum-regulated clock enabled the oblate shape of the Earth to be ascertained 350 years before satellites were launched.

To legions of scientists, awareness of global warming has been a long and treacherous journey, fraught with years of data collection and interpretation. What follows is a short glimpse into how scientists determined that the Earth is warming.

In the mid-nineteenth century, Scottish scientist James Croll proposed that variations in the Earth’s orientation toward the Sun were responsible for colder time periods. But he was never quite able to convince his contemporaries of this argument. Future scientific evidence showed that these climate changes amplified each other, leading toward what we now consider an ice age.

The struggle to determine the age of the earth illustrates that it can take many individuals, over long periods of time and in strange ways, to answer deep questions. Examining the evidence and arguments put forward for the earth’s age will help you better understand how science works and the important science idea that the earth is very old.

In 1912, Alfred Wegener proposed the theory of continental drift, arguing that all the continents were once joined together in a single landmass and have drifted apart. This story will help you better understand how Wegener and other scientists came to this conclusion. It also provides an interesting glimpse into how science operates to create new knowledge.