What Is Earth and Space Science?

Right now, without feeling anything, you are moving. The ground beneath your feet is part of a tectonic plate — a massive slab of rock — that is drifting across the surface of the planet at approximately the same speed your fingernails grow: a few centimeters per year. Over millions of years, that slow drift has rearranged the continents, opened and closed oceans, built the Himalayas, and broken apart a supercontinent called Pangaea that once contained every landmass on Earth. At the same time, you are orbiting the Sun at 67,000 miles per hour, as part of a solar system in the outer arm of a galaxy containing four hundred billion stars, in a universe that began 13.8 billion years ago in an event so energetically extreme that all of space, time, matter, and energy emerged from it in less than a second. Earth and space science is the study of all of this — the planet we live on, the forces that shape it, and the cosmic context that surrounds it. It is one of the most humbling and awe-inspiring fields of human knowledge.