what i have learned in earth and life science essay

Essay on Earth And Life Science

Students are often asked to write an essay on Earth And Life Science in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on Earth And Life Science

What is earth and life science.

Earth and Life Science is a fascinating subject that explores our world and the life within it. It is a blend of two sciences: Earth Science and Life Science. Earth Science studies the Earth’s physical aspects like rocks, oceans, and atmosphere. Life Science, on the other hand, focuses on living organisms, their structure, function, and evolution.

Why Study Earth and Life Science?

Studying Earth and Life Science helps us understand our planet and the life it supports. This knowledge is vital for many reasons. It helps us predict natural disasters, understand climate change, and conserve biodiversity. It also guides us in making informed decisions about resources.

Branches of Earth and Life Science

Earth and Life Science is divided into many branches. In Earth Science, we have geology (study of rocks), meteorology (study of weather), and oceanography (study of oceans). In Life Science, we have biology (study of life), botany (study of plants), and zoology (study of animals).

Role of Earth and Life Science in Daily Life

Earth and Life Science plays a crucial role in our daily life. It helps us predict weather for planning outdoor activities. It aids farmers in understanding soil and climate for better crop production. Moreover, it helps doctors and scientists understand diseases and develop new medicines.

Future of Earth and Life Science

The future of Earth and Life Science is full of exciting possibilities. With advancements in technology, we can explore deeper into the Earth and outer space. We can also develop better ways to protect our environment and conserve biodiversity. It is a field that will continue to grow and evolve.

250 Words Essay on Earth And Life Science

Understanding earth and life science.

Earth and Life Science is a field of study that explores the natural world around us. It focuses on understanding the Earth, its structure, and how life forms interact with their environment.

The Earth’s Structure

The Earth is made up of several layers. The crust is the outermost layer that we live on. Beneath it is the mantle, a hot, flowing layer of rock. The core, at the center of the Earth, is divided into two parts: the outer core, which is liquid, and the inner core, which is solid.

Life Science

Life Science is about understanding living things. It studies how plants, animals, and humans function and interact with the environment. It also explores how life evolved over time, leading to the diversity we see today.

The Connection Between Earth and Life Science

The connection between Earth and Life Science is crucial. The Earth provides the environment for life to exist. The nature of the environment, such as the climate and available resources, influences the type of life that can survive there.

Importance of Earth and Life Science

Studying Earth and Life Science helps us understand our world better. It teaches us about natural events like earthquakes and hurricanes, and about the diversity of life on our planet. This knowledge can help us make informed decisions to protect our planet and its inhabitants.

In conclusion, Earth and Life Science is a fascinating field that explores the intricate relationship between our planet and the life it supports.

500 Words Essay on Earth And Life Science

Earth and Life Science is a fascinating field of study that helps us understand our world and the life forms that live in it. It is a combination of two major sciences. Earth Science studies the Earth, its structure, and how it changes over time. Life Science, on the other hand, focuses on living things, their functions, and their interactions with the environment.

Understanding Earth Science

Earth Science is like a detective story about our planet. It looks at the Earth’s layers, from the deepest core to the outer atmosphere. It investigates how mountains form, why earthquakes happen, and what causes volcanoes to erupt. Scientists in this field also study the weather and climate patterns to predict future conditions.

Exploring Life Science

Life Science is all about studying living things. It includes everything from tiny bacteria to large elephants, from simple plants to complex human beings. Scientists in this field try to understand how these organisms live, grow, and interact with their surroundings. They study topics like genetics, evolution, and ecosystems.

How are Earth and Life Science Connected?

Earth and Life Science are closely connected. The Earth provides the environment where life exists. For example, the water cycle studied in Earth Science is essential for all life forms. Likewise, the atmosphere that Earth Science studies protects us from harmful solar radiation and helps maintain the right conditions for life.

In return, living things also affect the Earth. For instance, plants help create oxygen and reduce carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which impacts the Earth’s climate.

Why is Earth and Life Science Important?

Studying Earth and Life Science is important for many reasons. It helps us understand how our planet works and how we can protect it. It teaches us about the diversity of life and how all living things are connected. It also helps us make informed decisions about important issues like climate change, conservation, and public health.

Earth and Life Science in Everyday Life

Even if we don’t realize it, Earth and Life Science are part of our everyday life. When we check the weather forecast, we are using data from Earth Science. When we take medicine to fight off an illness, we are applying knowledge from Life Science.

In conclusion, Earth and Life Science are fascinating fields that help us understand our world and the life it supports. They are also incredibly important, influencing many aspects of our daily lives and helping us make informed decisions about our future.

That’s it! I hope the essay helped you.

If you’re looking for more, here are essays on other interesting topics:

Essay on E Learning
Essay on E Commerce Boon Or Bane
Essay on E Commerce

Apart from these, you can look at all the essays by clicking here .

Happy studying!

NASA selects UChicago undergraduates’ proposal to build a ‘nano-satellite’

How do parents’ decisions impact a child’s development?

The origin of life on Earth, explained

The origin of life on Earth stands as one of the great mysteries of science. Various answers have been proposed, all of which remain unverified. To find out if we are alone in the galaxy, we will need to better understand what geochemical conditions nurtured the first life forms. What water, chemistry and temperature cycles fostered the chemical reactions that allowed life to emerge on our planet? Because life arose in the largely unknown surface conditions of Earth’s early history, answering these and other questions remains a challenge.

Several seminal experiments in this topic have been conducted at the University of Chicago, including the Miller-Urey experiment that suggested how the building blocks of life could form in a primordial soup.

Jump to a section:

When did life on Earth begin?

Where did life on Earth begin?

What are the ingredients of life on earth, what are the major scientific theories for how life emerged, what is chirality and why is it biologically important, what research are uchicago scientists currently conducting on the origins of life, when did life on earth begin .

Earth is about 4.5 billion years old. Scientists think that by 4.3 billion years ago, Earth may have developed conditions suitable to support life. The oldest known fossils, however, are only 3.7 billion years old. During that 600 million-year window, life may have emerged repeatedly, only to be snuffed out by catastrophic collisions with asteroids and comets.

The details of those early events are not well preserved in Earth’s oldest rocks. Some hints come from the oldest zircons, highly durable minerals that formed in magma. Scientists have found traces of a form of carbon—an important element in living organisms— in one such 4.1 billion-year-old zircon . However, it does not provide enough evidence to prove life’s existence at that early date.

Two possibilities are in volcanically active hydrothermal environments on land and at sea.

Some microorganisms thrive in the scalding, highly acidic hot springs environments like those found today in Iceland, Norway and Yellowstone National Park. The same goes for deep-sea hydrothermal vents. These chimney-like vents form where seawater comes into contact with magma on the ocean floor, resulting in streams of superheated plumes. The microorganisms that live near such plumes have led some scientists to suggest them as the birthplaces of Earth’s first life forms.

Organic molecules may also have formed in certain types of clay minerals that could have offered favorable conditions for protection and preservation. This could have happened on Earth during its early history, or on comets and asteroids that later brought them to Earth in collisions. This would suggest that the same process could have seeded life on planets elsewhere in the universe.

The recipe consists of a steady energy source, organic compounds and water.

Sunlight provides the energy source at the surface, which drives photosynthesis. On the ocean floor, geothermal energy supplies the chemical nutrients that organisms need to live.

Also crucial are the elements important to life . For us, these are carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and phosphorus. But there are several scientific mysteries about how these elements wound up together on Earth. For example, scientists would not expect a planet that formed so close to the sun to naturally incorporate carbon and nitrogen. These elements become solid only under very cold temperatures, such as exist in the outer solar system, not nearer to the sun where Earth is. Also, carbon, like gold, is rare at the Earth’s surface. That’s because carbon chemically bonds more often with iron than rock. Gold also bonds more often with metal, so most of it ends up in the Earth’s core. So, how did the small amounts found at the surface get there? Could a similar process also have unfolded on other planets?

The last ingredient is water. Water now covers about 70% of Earth’s surface, but how much sat on the surface 4 billion years ago? Like carbon and nitrogen, water is much more likely to become a part of solid objects that formed at a greater distance from the sun. To explain its presence on Earth, one theory proposes that a class of meteorites called carbonaceous chondrites formed far enough from the sun to have served as a water-delivery system.

There are several theories for how life came to be on Earth. These include:

Life emerged from a primordial soup

As a University of Chicago graduate student in 1952, Stanley Miller performed a famous experiment with Harold Urey, a Nobel laureate in chemistry. Their results explored the idea that life formed in a primordial soup.

Miller and Urey injected ammonia, methane and water vapor into an enclosed glass container to simulate what were then believed to be the conditions of Earth’s early atmosphere. Then they passed electrical sparks through the container to simulate lightning. Amino acids, the building blocks of proteins, soon formed. Miller and Urey realized that this process could have paved the way for the molecules needed to produce life.

Scientists now believe that Earth’s early atmosphere had a different chemical makeup from Miller and Urey’s recipe. Even so, the experiment gave rise to a new scientific field called prebiotic or abiotic chemistry, the chemistry that preceded the origin of life. This is the opposite of biogenesis, the idea that only a living organism can beget another living organism.

Seeded by comets or meteors

Some scientists think that some of the molecules important to life may be produced outside the Earth. Instead, they suggest that these ingredients came from meteorites or comets.

“A colleague once told me, ‘It’s a lot easier to build a house out of Legos when they’re falling from the sky,’” said Fred Ciesla, a geophysical sciences professor at UChicago. Ciesla and that colleague, Scott Sandford of the NASA Ames Research Center, published research showing that complex organic compounds were readily produced under conditions that likely prevailed in the early solar system when many meteorites formed.

Meteorites then might have served as the cosmic Mayflowers that transported molecular seeds to Earth. In 1969, the Murchison meteorite that fell in Australia contained dozens of different amino acids—the building blocks of life.

Comets may also have offered a ride to Earth-bound hitchhiking molecules, according to experimental results published in 2001 by a team of researchers from Argonne National Laboratory, the University of California Berkeley, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. By showing that amino acids could survive a fiery comet collision with Earth, the team bolstered the idea that life’s raw materials came from space.

In 2019, a team of researchers in France and Italy reported finding extraterrestrial organic material preserved in the 3.3 billion-year-old sediments of Barberton, South Africa. The team suggested micrometeorites as the material’s likely source. Further such evidence came in 2022 from samples of asteroid Ryugu returned to Earth by Japan’s Hayabusa2 mission. The count of amino acids found in the Ryugu samples now exceeds 20 different types .

In 1953, UChicago researchers published a landmark paper in the Journal of Biological Chemistry that marked the discovery of the pro-chirality concept , which pervades modern chemistry and biology. The paper described an experiment showing that the chirality of molecules—or “handedness,” much the way the right and left hands differ from one another—drives all life processes. Without chirality, large biological molecules such as proteins would be unable to form structures that could be reproduced.

Today, research on the origin of life at UChicago is expanding. As scientists have been able to find more and more exoplanets—that is, planets around stars elsewhere in the galaxy—the question of what the essential ingredients for life are and how to look for signs of them has heated up.

Nobel laureate Jack Szostak joined the UChicago faculty as University Professor in Chemistry in 2022 and will lead the University’s new interdisciplinary Origins of Life Initiative to coordinate research efforts into the origin of life on Earth. Scientists from several departments of the Physical Sciences Division are joining the initiative, including specialists in chemistry, astronomy, geology and geophysics.

“Right now we are getting truly unprecedented amounts of data coming in: Missions like Hayabusa and OSIRIS-REx are bringing us pieces of asteroids, which helps us understand the conditions that form planets, and NASA’s new JWST telescope is taking astounding data on the solar system and the planets around us ,” said Prof. Ciesla. “I think we’re going to make huge progress on this question.”

Last updated Sept. 19, 2022.

Faculty Experts

Clara Blättler

Fred Ciesla

Jack Szostak

Additional Resources

The Origins of Life Speaker Series

Recommended Podcasts

Big Brains podcast: Unraveling the mystery of life’s origins on Earth

Discovering the Missing Link with Neil Shubin (Ep. 1)

More Explainers

Improv, Explained

Illustration of cosmic rays making contact with Earth

Cosmic rays, explained

Scientists find evidence that meltwater is fracturing ice shelves in Antarctica

Mavis Staples, legendary singer and activist, returns to UChicago to inspire next generation

Go 'Inside the Lab' at UChicago

Explore labs through videos and Q and As with UChicago faculty, staff and students

Colorful altered-colored image view of space with a bright blob on one side labeled as the black hole and a second, smaller blue blur on the right side labeled "vent"

Scientists may have found the spot where our supermassive black hole “vents”

Pulitzer Prize

Trina Reynolds-Tyler, MPP'20, wins Pulitzer Prize in Local Reporting

Around uchicago, uchicago to offer new postbaccalaureate premedical certificate program.

Carnegie Fellow

UChicago political scientist Molly Offer-Westort named Carnegie Fellow

National Academy of Sciences

Five UChicago faculty elected to National Academy of Sciences in 2024

Laing Award

UChicago Press awards top honor to Margareta Ingrid Christian for ‘Objects in A…

Assortment of bones and skeletons inside Sereno's lab

Biological Sciences Division

UChicago paleontologist Paul Sereno’s fossil lab moves to Washington Park

photo of white crabapple blossoms framing a gothic-spire tower on UChicago campus

Six UChicago scholars elected to American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2024

“you have to be open minded, planning to reinvent yourself every five to seven years.”.

Prof. Chuan He faces camera smiling with hands on hips with a chemistry lab in the background

UChicago announces 2024 winners of Quantrell and PhD Teaching Awards

Want to create or adapt books like this? Learn more about how Pressbooks supports open publishing practices.

Chapter 1 Introduction to Geology

1.2 Why Study Earth?

The simple answer to this question is that Earth is our home — our only home for the foreseeable future — and in order to ensure that it continues to be a great place to live, we need to understand how it works. Another answer is that some of us can’t help but study it because it’s fascinating. But there is more to it than that:

We rely on Earth for valuable resources such as soil, water, metals, industrial minerals, and energy, and we need to know how to find these resources and exploit them sustainably.
We can study rocks and the fossils they contain to understand the evolution of our environment and the life within it.
We can learn to minimize our risks from earthquakes, volcanoes, slope failures, and damaging storms.
We can learn how and why Earth’s climate has changed in the past, and use that knowledge to understand both natural and human-caused climate change.
We can recognize how our activities have altered the environment in many ways and the climate in increasingly serious ways, and how to avoid more severe changes in the future.
We can use our knowledge of Earth to understand other planets in our solar system, as well as those around distant stars.

An example of the importance of geological studies for minimizing risks to the public is illustrated in Figure 1.2. This is a slope failure that took place in January 2005 in the Riverside Drive area of North Vancouver. The steep bank beneath the house shown gave way, and a slurry of mud and sand flowed down, destroying another house below and killing one person. This event took place following a heavy rainfall, which is a common occurrence in southwestern B.C. in the winter.

Photograph of the aftermath of a deadly debris flow in the Riverside Drive area of North Vancouver in January, 2005 [The Province, used with permission]

The irony of the 2005 slope failure is that the District of North Vancouver had been warned in a geological report written in 1980 that this area was prone to slope failure and that steps should be taken to minimize the risk to residents. Very little was done in the intervening 25 years, and the results were deadly.

Share This Book

what i have learned in earth and life science essay

school Campus Bookshelves
menu_book Bookshelves
perm_media Learning Objects
login Login
how_to_reg Request Instructor Account
hub Instructor Commons

Margin Size

Download Page (PDF)
Download Full Book (PDF)
Periodic Table
Physics Constants
Scientific Calculator
Reference & Cite
Tools expand_more
Readability

selected template will load here

This action is not available.

1: Life and Earth

Last updated
Save as PDF
Page ID 6265

Dawn Sumner
University of California, Davis

$ \newcommand{\vecs}[1]{\overset { \scriptstyle \rightharpoonup} {\mathbf{#1}} } $

$ \newcommand{\vecd}[1]{\overset{-\!-\!\rightharpoonup}{\vphantom{a}\smash {#1}}} $

$ \newcommand{\id}{\mathrm{id}}$ $ \newcommand{\Span}{\mathrm{span}}$

( \newcommand{\kernel}{\mathrm{null}\,}\) $ \newcommand{\range}{\mathrm{range}\,}$

$ \newcommand{\RealPart}{\mathrm{Re}}$ $ \newcommand{\ImaginaryPart}{\mathrm{Im}}$

$ \newcommand{\Argument}{\mathrm{Arg}}$ $ \newcommand{\norm}[1]{\| #1 \|}$

$ \newcommand{\inner}[2]{\langle #1, #2 \rangle}$

$ \newcommand{\Span}{\mathrm{span}}$

$ \newcommand{\id}{\mathrm{id}}$

$ \newcommand{\kernel}{\mathrm{null}\,}$

$ \newcommand{\range}{\mathrm{range}\,}$

$ \newcommand{\RealPart}{\mathrm{Re}}$

$ \newcommand{\ImaginaryPart}{\mathrm{Im}}$

$ \newcommand{\Argument}{\mathrm{Arg}}$

$ \newcommand{\norm}[1]{\| #1 \|}$

$ \newcommand{\Span}{\mathrm{span}}$ $ \newcommand{\AA}{\unicode[.8,0]{x212B}}$

$ \newcommand{\vectorA}[1]{\vec{#1}} % arrow$

$ \newcommand{\vectorAt}[1]{\vec{\text{#1}}} % arrow$

$ \newcommand{\vectorB}[1]{\overset { \scriptstyle \rightharpoonup} {\mathbf{#1}} } $

$ \newcommand{\vectorC}[1]{\textbf{#1}} $

$ \newcommand{\vectorD}[1]{\overrightarrow{#1}} $

$ \newcommand{\vectorDt}[1]{\overrightarrow{\text{#1}}} $

$ \newcommand{\vectE}[1]{\overset{-\!-\!\rightharpoonup}{\vphantom{a}\smash{\mathbf {#1}}}} $

Earth is the only known inhabited planet, and the geological record demonstrates that life and Earth have co-evolved for billions of years in a closely linked system. Life is sustained by energy and material exchanges among Earth’s interior, Earth’s surface, and the Sun. In turn, life has changed the surface chemistry of Earth. These changes have propagated into Earth's interior through subduction. Through time, the mantle, lithosphere, hydrosphere, atmosphere, and biosphere have slowly evolved, with intervals of rapid change due to historical events (e.g. impacts, evolution of land plants, etc.). Both incremental evolution and historical events are reflected in the co-evolution of Earth and life. This evolution is reflected in biogeochemical cycles that extend from the mantle to the top of the atmosphere, with ecosystems evolving in response to perturbations and inducing planetary-scale changes in Earth’s surface processes.

The field of Geobiology focuses on understanding these changes using diverse fields of study. Geobiologists can study modern life through ecology, organismal processes, genetics, and biogeochemistry. They can study the history of these interactions through geological studies, paleontology, geochemical approaches, and modeling. They can study these processes on other planets by applying what we understand of interactions on Earth to our observations from missions and telescopes. The key aspect that makes a study part of Geobiology is that it provides insights into how life and Earth (or other planets or moons) interact through time.

Sometimes it helps to look at a simplified system to understand a more complex one. The first part of this chapter introduces a very simple biosphere on a very simple world: Daisyworld (Watson and Lovelock, 1983). Black and white daisies on a planet receive energy from a star and influence the planet's temperature. We ignore all the biological aspects of daisies except their preferred temperature for sprouting and growth, plus their need for somewhere to grow. Even though Daisyworld represents a very simple ecosystem, it is still an interesting planet!

The second part of this chapter discusses some of the interactions among organisms that create complexity in ecosystems. In all cases, these interactions occur in the context of our planet and the resources it provides. While reading about interactions types, think about the interactions among the daisies in Daisyworld. How many different types of interactions are there? Can they be classified into the interaction types described in the second part of the chapter? If this was a real ecosystem, what other organisms would be needed to allow the daisies to grow? How would any of these needs affect the simple Daisyworld model?

Thumbnail: An artist's impression of ice age Earth at glacial maximum. CC-BY-SA 3.0 Unported; Ittiz via wikipedia ).

1.1: Daisyworld Daisyworld illustrates the importance of interactions between life and Earth.
1.2 Interactions Among Organisms Organisms and species interact in various ways that are beneficial, neutral or harmful.

Watson, Andrew J. & James E. Lovelock (1983) Biological homeostasis of the global environment: the parable of Daisyworld, Tellus B: Chemical and Physical Meteorology, 35:4, 284-289, DOI: 10.3402/tellusb.v35i4.14616 )

Ask An Astrobiologist
Resources Graphic Histories Coloring Pages Heroes Posters Life in the extremes Digital Backgrounds SciComm Guild

5. How have life and Earth co-evolved?

5.1. how did life first emerge on earth.

Grades K-2 or Adult Naive Learner

NGSS Connections for Teachers
Concept Boundaries for Scientists

Have you ever had a mystery to solve? Like a time when you knew something happened, but you didn’t really know how? Maybe you felt like you needed to find some clues to figure out what happened. That’s how scientists feel about figuring out how life got going here on Earth long ago. If you have a mystery and are curious, you start looking for clues. Scientists are doing that right now. They may not figure it all out before you are a grown up. When you get older maybe you could help find clues to this mystery as well. What kinds of clues do you think would be helpful in learning about things that happened long ago?

Disciplinary Core Ideas

ESS1.C: The History of Planet Earth: Some events happen very quickly; others occur very slowly, over a time period much longer than one can observe. (2-ESS1-1)

ESS3.A: Natural Resources: Living things need water, air, and resources from the land, and they live in places that have the things they need. Humans use natural resources for everything they do. (K-ESS3-1)

Crosscutting Concepts

Patterns: Patterns in the natural and human designed world can be observed and used as evidence. (K-LS1-1)

Big Ideas: How life got started on Earth is a mystery. Scienists are piecing together the clues to learn more about how life began on Earth.

Boundaries: In this grade band, Earth events are described in terms of relative time rather than quantitative measurements of timescales. (2-ESS1-1)

No appropriate content for this grade level. Please use the navigation arrows to switch levels.

Grades 3-5 or Adult Emerging Learner

The Earth is really old. It’s older than any grownups you know, it’s older than human civilization, and it’s older than the time when the dinosaurs were alive. But, as old as Earth is, we’ve found evidence that tells us that living things have been around on Earth for almost as long as our planet has been here.

Life started on Earth so long ago that it’s hard for us to know exactly how it started. But there are scientists out there who are collecting information from old rocks, running experiments in laboratories, and using computer programs to test their ideas in order to learn more about the origin of life on Earth. It’s a pretty big mystery to try to uncover and we might never know for sure how life started, but we’re getting closer and closer to understanding how it could have happened.

ESS1.C: The History of Planet Earth: Local, regional, and global patterns of rock formations reveal changes over time due to Earth forces, such as earthquakes. The presence and location of certain fossil types indicate the order in which rock layers were formed. (4-ESS1-1)

LS2.B: Cycles of Matter and Energy Transfer in Ecosystems: Matter cycles between the air and soil and among plants, animals, and microbes as these organisms live and die. Organisms obtain gases, and water, from the environment, and release waste matter (gas, liquid, or solid) back into the environment. (5-LS2-1)

ESS2.E: Biogeology: Living things affect the physical characteristics of their regions. (4-ESS2-1)

Patterns: Patterns can be used as evidence to support an explanation. (4-ESS1-1, 4-ESS2-2)

Boundaries: Examples of information obtained from old rocks include rock layers with marine shell fossils above rock layers with plant fossils and no shells, indicating a change from land to water over time; and, a canyon with different rock layers in the walls and a river in the bottom, indicating that over time a river cut through the rock. Emphasis is on relative time. (4-ESS1-1)

Grades 6-8 or Adult Building Learner

The Earth is really old. Using the tools of science, we have learned that Earth is about 4.5 billion years old. As old as Earth is, we’ve found evidence that tells us that living things have been around on Earth for almost as long as our planet has been here. We have evidence that tells us that life may have been on Earth as far back as about 4 billion years ago.

Life started on Earth so long ago that it’s hard for us to know exactly how it started. But there are scientists out there who are trying to figure that out. They include people who study the fossils of ancient bacteria or look for other signs of ancient life in old rocks. There are also people who are running experiments in laboratories to see how the basic building blocks of life can come together to make living things. And there are people who use computer programs to test our ideas about how life might have started.

ESS1.C: The History of Planet Earth: The geologic time scale interpreted from rock strata provides a way to organize Earth’s history. Analyses of rock strata and the fossil record provide only relative dates, not an absolute scale. (MS-ESS1-4)

ESS2.A: Earth’s Materials and Systems: 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. (MS-ESS2-2) All Earth processes are the result of energy flowing and matter cycling within and among the planet’s systems. This energy is derived from the Sun and Earth’s hot interior. The energy that flows and matter that cycles produce chemical and physical changes in Earth’s materials and living organisms. (MS-ESS2-1)

ESS2.B: Plate Tectonics and Large-Scale System Interactions: Maps of ancient land and water patterns, based on investigations of rocks and fossils, make clear how Earth’s plates have moved great distances, collided, and spread apart. (MS-ESS2-3)

Scale Proportion and Quantity: Time, space, and energy phenomena can be observed at various scales using models to study systems that are too large or too small. (MS-ESS1-4, MS-ESS2-2)

Big Ideas: The Earth has been around for a very long time. Scientists are investigating the early Earth environment and possible ways life started on Earth. Certain features, like rocks, can be used to order events that have occurred on Earth. There are still many aspects of early life that are unknown. Uncovering how life began on Earth can help with understanding how life could have possibly began on other worlds.

Boundaries: Emphasis is on how analyses of rock formations and the fossils they contain are used to establish relative ages of major events in Earth’s history. Examples of Earth’s major events could range from being very recent (such as the last Ice Age or the earliest fossils of homo sapiens) to very old (such as the formation of Earth or the earliest evidence of life). Examples can include the formation of mountain chains and ocean basins, the evolution or extinction of particular living organisms, or significant volcanic eruptions. Assessment does not include recalling the names of specific periods or epochs and events within them. (MS-ESS1-4)

6-12 Astrobiology Math. This collection of math problems provides an authentic glimpse of modern astrobiology science and engineering issues, often involving actual research data. Students explore concepts in astrobiology through calculations. Relevant topics include The Origin of Life (page 3) and Miller-Urey Experiment: Complex Organic Molecules (page 13) where students explore concepts in science through calculations. NASA . https://www.nasa.gov/pdf/637832main_Astrobiology_Math.pdf

Grades 9-12 or Adult Sophisticated Learner

One of the greatest mysteries about life on our planet is when and how it first started. Life appears to have been here for a very long time. Using the tools of science, we have learned that Earth is about 4.5 billion years old. And, as old as Earth is, we’ve found evidence that tells us that living things have been around on Earth for almost as long as our planet has been here. We have evidence that tells us that life may have been on Earth as far back as about 4 billion years ago and maybe even before that.

Life started on Earth so long ago that it’s hard for us to know exactly how it started. But there are scientists out there who are trying to figure that out. They include field scientists who study the fossils of ancient bacteria or look for other signs of ancient life in old rocks. For instance, they sometimes will look at the isotopes of elements like carbon that are trapped in old rocks to see if they imply biological activity. If they find such evidence, they can then also use other information from the rocks to figure out what kind of environment was available for the potential living things that were around when the rock formed. There are also scientists who are running experiments in laboratories to see how the basic building blocks of life can come together to make living things. For example, some lab experiments can be set up to figure out what conditions would be necessary for cell membranes to form without life. It turns out that some molecules can come together to make pockets just like cells under the right conditions. Outside of studying clues that we can find in the rocks and running experiments in labs, we can also use computer programs to test our ideas about how life might have started. All of these kinds of research projects have helped us to learn a lot more about how life might have come about on our planet.

Many scientists agree that the earliest life would have needed a good bit of water, the fundamental CHNOPS elements present to make organic molecules, and some way to concentrate simple organic molecules (since that would be necessary to make more complex molecules for biological processes). This can happen in tidal zones around the ocean, in little droplets of water that get sprayed into the atmosphere from ocean waves, where hydrothermal vents form on the ocean floor, or maybe even in small ponds or lakes when they dry up. It would also have been necessary to bring these molecules together in just the right way to make some chemical reactions more likely to occur. It turns out that some minerals, including pyrite (made of iron and sulfur) and many clays, are really good at orienting molecules in ways that causes them to react with each other. Life as we know it is based on cells, so an environment where life emerges would also need naturally-made containers with an inside and outside. It turns out that little enclosures with lipid membranes, just like cells, can form without life (also called “abiotically”). Depending on the chemistry of the fluid involved, these non-living cells can form automatically.

Environmental niches being investigated as potential places for the origin of life on Earth include surface waters such as lakes and ponds, sea ice, hydrothermal vents, tide pools, and hot springs. All of these areas currently have living things thriving in them, many of which are considered to be extremophiles. Investigations on the genetics of known organisms on Earth has suggested that the earliest life might have been thermophilic (adapted to hotter environments), which has caused a lot of people to suspect that hydrothermal systems might be important for the formation of life. As we learn more about how life on Earth may have started, it helps us to better understand the places we should first look at on other worlds in our solar system and beyond if we want to see if alien life exists. For instance, the possibility for hydrothermal vents to be active and possible sites of living processes in the oceans of Europa and Enceladus make these two moons really important places for us to study.

Uncovering the origin of life on Earth is a pretty big mystery to try to solve. We might never actually know for sure how life started, but we’re getting closer and closer to understanding how it could have happened here on Earth and possibly on other worlds as well. Perhaps the emergence of life on a world isn’t just something that happens on it, but rather to it. Some people suspect that the development of life is a natural process that occurs for many worlds in the Universe, but we can’t test that idea or figure out how common life may be until we’ve first discovered whether or not we’re alone.

ESS1.C: The History of Planet Earth: Continental rocks, which can be older than 4 billion years, are generally much older than the rocks of the ocean floor, which are less than 200 million years old. (HS-ESS1-5) *Although active geologic processes, such as plate tectonics and erosion, have destroyed or altered most of the very early rock record on Earth, other objects in the solar system, such as lunar rocks, asteroids, and meteorites, have changed little over billions of years. Studying these objects can provide information about Earth’s formation and early history. (HS-ESS1-6)

ESS2.A: Earth Materials and Systems: Earth’s systems, being dynamic and interacting, cause feedback effects that can increase or decrease the original changes. (HS-ESS2-1)

ESS2.C: The Roles of Water in Earth’s Surface Processes: The abundance of liquid water on Earth’s surface and its unique combination of physical and chemical properties are central to the planet’s dynamics. These properties include water’s exceptional capacity to absorb, store, and release large amounts of energy, transmit sunlight, expand upon freezing, dissolve and transport materials, and lower the viscosities and melting points of rocks. (HS-ESS2-5)

ESS2.E: Biogeology: The many dynamic and delicate feedbacks between the biosphere and other Earth systems cause a continual co-evolution of Earth’s surface and the life that exists on it. (HS-ESS2-7)

PS1.B: Chemical Reactions: Chemical processes, their rates, and whether or not energy is stored or released can be understood in terms of the collisions of molecules and the rearrangements of atoms into new molecules, with consequent changes in the sum of all bond energies in the set of molecules that are matched by changes in kinetic energy. (HS-PS1-4, HS-PS1-5) *In many situations, a dynamic and condition-dependent balance between a reaction and the reverse reaction determines the numbers of all types of molecules present. (HS-PS1-6)

PS3.A: Definitions of Energy: Energy is a quantitative property of a system that depends on the motion and interactions of matter and radiation within that system. That there is a single quantity called energy is due to the fact that a system’s total energy is conserved, even as, within the system, energy is continually transferred from one object to another and between its various possible forms. (HS-PS3-1, HS-PS3-2)

LS1.A: Structure and Function: Systems of specialized cells within organisms help them perform the essential functions of life. (HS-LS1-1) *All cells contain genetic information in the form of DNA molecules. Genes are regions in the DNA that contain the instructions that code for the formation of proteins, which carry out most of the work of cells. (HS-LS1-1)

Systems and System Models: Models (e.g., physical, mathematical, computer models) can be used to simulate systems and interactions — including energy, matter, and information flows — within and between systems at different scales. (HS-LS1-2)

Big Ideas: The Earth has been around for about 4.5 billion years. Evidence indicates living things have been on Earth for about 4 billion years. Scientists are investigating the early Earth environment and possible ways life started on Earth. Certain features, like rocks, can be used to order events that have occurred on Earth. Environmental niches with rather extreme conditions are being studied as locations for early Earth life. There are still many aspects of early life that are unknown. Uncovering how life began on Earth can help with understanding how life could have possibly began on other worlds.

Boundaries: In this grade band, emphasis is placed on using available evidence within the solar system to reconstruct the early history of Earth, which formed along with the rest of the solar system 4.6 billion years ago. Examples of evidence include the absolute ages of ancient materials (obtained by radiometric dating of meteorites, moon rocks, and Earth’s oldest minerals), the sizes and compositions of solar system objects, and the impact cratering record of planetary surfaces. (HS-ESS1-6)

9-10 Voyages through Time: Origin of Life. Through the Origin of Life module students address questions such as: What is life? What is the evidence for early evolution of life on Earth? How did life begin? Sample lesson on the website and the curriculum is available for purchase. SETI . http://www.voyagesthroughtime.org/origin/index.html

10-12 Is Anyone Out There? In this 20-minute TED talk, John Delano speaks to the early Earth the beginning of life on Earth as a mystery that illuminates the possibilities for life to be found beyond Earth. He outlines the evidence and continued areas of study for four main questions: Where did the prebiotic molecules come from? How were they assembled into complex molecules? When did life originate? and What does life remember about the old days (implying evidence for the circumstances of the origin of life)? John Delano/TED. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrQY7vQy50M

Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript.

View all journals
Explore content
About the journal
Publish with us
Sign up for alerts
16 October 2023

How would we know whether there is life on Earth? This bold experiment found out

Alexandra Witze

You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

You have full access to this article via your institution.

Anything down there? Earth as seen by the Galileo probe in 1990. Credit: NASA/JPL

It began the way many discoveries do — a tickling of curiosity in the back of someone’s mind. That someone was astronomer and communicator Carl Sagan. The thing doing the tickling was the trajectory of NASA’s Galileo spacecraft, which had launched in October 1989 and was the first to orbit Jupiter. The result was a paper in Nature 30 years ago this week that changed how scientists thought about looking for life on other planets.

The opportunity stemmed from a tragic mishap. Almost four years before Galileo’s launch, in January 1986, the space shuttle Challenger had exploded shortly after lift-off, taking seven lives with it. NASA cancelled its plans to dispatch Galileo on a speedy path to Jupiter using a liquid-fuelled rocket aboard another space shuttle. Instead, the probe was released more gently from an orbiting shuttle, with mission engineers slingshotting it around Venus and Earth so it could gain the gravitational boosts that would catapult it all the way to Jupiter.

On 8 December 1990, Galileo was due to skim past Earth, just 960 kilometres above the surface. The tickling became an itch that Sagan had to scratch. He talked NASA into pointing the spacecraft’s instruments at our planet. The resulting paper was titled ‘A search for life on Earth from the Galileo spacecraft’ 1 .

The outside view

We are in a unique position of knowing that life exists on Earth. To use our own home to test whether we could discern that remotely was an extraordinary suggestion at the time, when so little was known about the environments in which life might thrive. “It’s almost like a science-fiction story wrapped up in a paper,” says David Grinspoon, senior scientist for astrobiology strategy at NASA’s headquarters in Washington DC. “Let’s imagine that we’re seeing Earth for the first time.”

It came at a time, too, when the search for life elsewhere in the Solar System was at a low ebb. US and Soviet robotic missions in the 1960s and 1970s had revealed that Venus — once thought to be a haven for exotic organisms — was hellishly hot beneath its dense clouds of carbon dioxide. Mars, crisscrossed by the ‘irrigation canals’ of astronomers’ imagination 2 , was a seemingly barren wasteland. In 1990, no one yet knew about the buried oceans that lay on Jupiter’s moon Europa — a discovery that Galileo would go on to make 3 — or on Saturn’s moon Enceladus, both of which are now seen as potential cradles of extraterrestrial life.

Crucially, Sagan and his collaborators took a deliberately agnostic approach to the detection of life, says astrobiologist Lisa Kaltenegger, who heads the Carl Sagan Institute at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. “Of course he wants to find life, every scientist does,” she says. “But he says, let’s take that wish and be even more cautious — because we want to find it.” The existence of life was to be, in the words of the paper, the “hypothesis of last resort” for explaining what Galileo observed.

But even through this veil of scepticism, the spacecraft delivered. High-resolution images of Australia and Antarctica obtained as Galileo flew overhead did not yield signs of civilization. Still, Galileo measured oxygen and methane in Earth’s atmosphere, the latter in ratios that suggested a disequilibrium brought about by living organisms. It spotted a steep cliff in the infrared spectrum of sunlight reflecting off the planet, a distinctive ‘red edge’ that indicates the presence of vegetation. And it picked up radio transmissions coming from the surface that were moderated as if engineered. “A strong case can be made that the signals are generated by an intelligent form of life on Earth,” Sagan’s team wrote, rather cheekily.

A powerful control

Karl Ziemelis, now chief physical sciences editor at Nature , handled the paper as a rookie editor. He says it remains one of his favourites — and one of the hardest to get in. Editorial approval for the paper was far from unanimous, because it was not obviously describing something new. But, according to Ziemelis, that was mostly beside the point. “It was an incredibly powerful control experiment for something that wasn’t really on many people’s radar at the time,” he says.

“While the answer was known, it profoundly changed our way of thinking about the answer,” says Kaltenegger. Only by stepping back and regarding Earth as a planet like any other — perhaps harbouring life, perhaps not — can researchers begin to get a true perspective on our place in the Universe and the likelihood of life elsewhere, she says.

This false color image of the Eastern Coast of Australia was obtained by the Galileo spacecraft, 1990.

No sign of civilization in Australia. Credit: NASA/JPL

It takes on a new importance given developments since the Galileo flyby. In 1990, no planets orbiting stars other than the Sun were known. It was another two years before astronomers conclusively reported the first ‘exoplanet’ orbiting a rotating dead star known as a pulsar 4 , and three years more before they found 5 the first around a Sun-like star, 51 Pegasi. Today, scientists know of more than 5,500 exoplanets, few of which look like anything in the Solar System. They range from ‘super-Earths’ with bizarre geologies and ‘mini-Neptunes’ with gassy atmospheres to ‘hot Jupiters’, huge planets whirling close to their blazing stars.

When Sagan and his colleagues pointed Galileo at Earth, they invented a scientific framework for looking for signs of life on these other worlds — one that has permeated every search for such biosignatures since. Kaltenegger still gives Sagan’s paper to her students to show them how it is done. Life is the last, not first, inference to draw when seeing something unusual on another planet, she tells them. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

The right mix for life

This lesson could not be more important today, as scientists stand on the verge of potentially revolutionary, and perhaps monumentally confusing, discoveries by the powerful James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). The telescope is just beginning its remote exploration of the atmospheres of dozens of exoplanets, hunting for the same sort of chemical disequilibrium that Galileo spotted in Earth’s atmosphere. It is already turning up early hints of biosignatures that might lead scientists and the public astray.

For instance, JWST has sniffed out methane in the atmosphere of at least one planet. That gas is a powerful signature of life on Earth, but it can also come from volcanoes, no life required. Oxygen captures scientists’ attention because much of it is generated by life on Earth, but it can also be formed by light splitting apart molecules of water or carbon dioxide. Finding the right combination of methane and oxygen could indicate the presence of life on another planet — but that world needs to be located in a temperate zone, not too hot nor too cold. Getting the right mix of life-sustaining ingredients in a life-friendly environment is challenging, Kaltenegger says.

The same is true for other intriguing mixes of atmospheric gases. Just last month, astronomers sifting through JWST data reported finding methane and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of a large exoplanet called K2-18 b. They suggested that the planet might have water oceans covering its surface, and hinted at tantalizing detections of dimethyl sulfide, a compound that, on Earth, comes from phytoplankton and other living organisms 6 .

Headlines ran wild, with news stories reporting possible signs of life on K2-18 b. Never mind that the presence of dimethyl sulfide was reported with low confidence and needed further validation. Nor that no water had actually been detected on the planet. And, even if water were present, it might be in an ocean so deep as to choke off all geological activity that could maintain a temperate atmosphere.

Building evidence

Challenges such as these led Jim Green, a former chief scientist at NASA, to propose a framework in 2021 for how to report evidence for life beyond Earth 7 . A progressive scale, from one to seven, for example, could help to convey the level of evidence for life in a particular discovery, he argues. Maybe you’ve got a signal that could result from biological activity — that would just be a one on the scale. You’d need to work through many more steps, such as ruling out contamination and acquiring independent evidence of the strength of that signal before you could get to level 7 and demonstrate a true discovery of life beyond Earth.

It could take a long time. A telescope might sniff out an intriguing molecule, and scientists would argue about it. Another telescope might be built to work out the context of the observation. Each brick of evidence must be placed on top of another, each layer of mortar mixed through the arguments, scepticism and agnosticism of many, many scientists. And that’s assuming that life on another world resembles that on Earth — an assumption underlying the conclusions drawn from Galileo’s observations. “The uncertainty may last years or decades,” Grinspoon says. Sagan, who died in 1996, would have loved it.

The same year that Galileo observed Earth, Sagan convinced NASA to point another spacecraft in a direction the agency had not been planning. As Voyager 1 raced past Neptune on its way out of the Solar System, it turned its cameras back towards Earth and photographed a tiny speck, gleaming in a sunbeam. This was the iconic Pale Blue Dot image that inspired Sagan to ruminate in his 1994 book Pale Blue Dot : “That’s here. That’s home. That’s us.”

That fragile gleaming pixel reshaped how humanity visualizes its place in the Cosmos. So, too, did using Galileo to look for life on Earth, says Kaltenegger: “This is how we can use our pale blue dot to provide a template for the search for life on other planets.”

Nature 622 , 451-452 (2023)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-023-03230-z

Sagan, C., Thompson, W. R., Carlson, R., Gurnett, D. & Hord, C. Nature 365 , 715–721 (1993).

Article PubMed Google Scholar

Sagan, C. & Pollack, J. B. Nature 212 , 117–121 (1966).

Article Google Scholar

Kivelson, M. G. et al. Science 289 , 1340–1343 (2000).

Wolszczan, A. & Frail, D. A. Nature 355 , 145–147 (1992).

Mayor, M. & Queloz, D. Nature 378 , 355–359 (1995).

Madhusudhan, N. et al. Preprint at https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.05566 (2023).

Green, J. et al. Nature 598 , 575–579 (2021).

Download references

A search for life on Earth from the Galileo spacecraft

Carl Sagan (1934–96) Astronomer and popularizer of science

Planetary science
Astronomy and astrophysics
Space physics

Save the forest to save the tiger — why vegetation conservation matters

News & Views 21 MAY 24

A high internal heat flux and large core in a warm neptune exoplanet

Article 20 MAY 24

Why the European Space Agency should join the US mission to Uranus

Comment 20 MAY 24

Is that a giant sandwich? No, it’s the biggest protoplanetary disk in the sky

Research Highlight 23 MAY 24

Lense–Thirring precession after a supermassive black hole disrupts a star

Article 22 MAY 24

The solar dynamo begins near the surface

Dazzling auroras are just a warm-up as more solar storms are likely, scientists say

News Explainer 13 MAY 24

Recruitment of Global Talent at the Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Sciences (IOZ, CAS)

The Institute of Zoology (IOZ), Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), is seeking global talents around the world.

Beijing, China

Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Sciences (IOZ, CAS)

Full Professorship (W3) in “Organic Environmental Geochemistry (f/m/d)

The Institute of Earth Sciences within the Faculty of Chemistry and Earth Sciences at Heidelberg University invites applications for a FULL PROFE...

Heidelberg, Brandenburg (DE)

Universität Heidelberg

Postdoc: deep learning for super-resolution microscopy

The Ries lab is looking for a PostDoc with background in machine learning.

Vienna, Austria

University of Vienna

Postdoc: development of a novel MINFLUX microscope

The Ries lab is developing super-resolution microscopy methods for structural cell biology. In this project we will develop a fast, simple, and robust

Postdoctoral scholarship in Structural biology of neurodegeneration

A 2-year fellowship in multidisciplinary project combining molecular, structural and cell biology approaches to understand neurodegenerative disease

Umeå, Sweden

Umeå University

Quick links

Explore articles by subject
Guide to authors
Editorial policies

Science Essay

Learn How to Write an A+ Science Essay

11 min read

What Is a Science Essay?

A science essay is an academic paper focusing on a scientific topic from physics, chemistry, biology, or any other scientific field.

Science essays are mostly expository. That is, they require you to explain your chosen topic in detail. However, they can also be descriptive and exploratory.

A descriptive science essay aims to describe a certain scientific phenomenon according to established knowledge.

On the other hand, the exploratory science essay requires you to go beyond the current theories and explore new interpretations.

So before you set out to write your essay, always check out the instructions given by your instructor. Whether a science essay is expository or exploratory must be clear from the start. Or, if you face any difficulty, you can take help from a science essay writer as well.

Moreover, check out this video to understand scientific writing in detail.

Now that you know what it is, let's look at the steps you need to take to write a science essay.

Paper Due? Why Suffer? That's our Job!

How To Write a Science Essay?

Writing a science essay is not as complex as it may seem. All you need to do is follow the right steps to create an impressive piece of work that meets the assigned criteria.

Here's what you need to do:

Choose Your Topic

A good topic forms the foundation for an engaging and well-written essay. Therefore, you should ensure that you pick something interesting or relevant to your field of study.

To choose a good topic, you can brainstorm ideas relating to the subject matter. You may also find inspiration from other science essays or articles about the same topic.

Conduct Research

Once you have chosen your topic, start researching it thoroughly to develop a strong argument or discussion in your essay.

Make sure you use reliable sources and cite them properly . You should also make notes while conducting your research so that you can reference them easily when writing the essay. Or, you can get expert assistance from an essay writing service to manage your citations.

Create an Outline

A good essay outline helps to organize the ideas in your paper. It serves as a guide throughout the writing process and ensures you don’t miss out on important points.

An outline makes it easier to write a well-structured paper that flows logically. It should be detailed enough to guide you through the entire writing process.

However, your outline should be flexible, and it's sometimes better to change it along the way to improve your structure.

Start Writing

Once you have a good outline, start writing the essay by following your plan.

The first step in writing any essay is to draft it. This means putting your thoughts down on paper in a rough form without worrying about grammar or spelling mistakes.

So begin your essay by introducing the topic, then carefully explain it using evidence and examples to support your argument.

Don't worry if your first draft isn't perfect - it's just the starting point!

Proofread & Edit

After finishing your first draft, take time to proofread and edit it for grammar and spelling mistakes.

Proofreading is the process of checking for grammatical mistakes. It should be done after you have finished writing your essay.

Editing, on the other hand, involves reviewing the structure and organization of your essay and its content. It should be done before you submit your final work.

Both proofreading and editing are essential for producing a high-quality essay. Make sure to give yourself enough time to do them properly!

After revising the essay, you should format it according to the guidelines given by your instructor. This could involve using a specific font size, page margins, or citation style.

Most science essays are written in Times New Roman font with 12-point size and double spacing. The margins should be 1 inch on all sides, and the text should be justified.

In addition, you must cite your sources properly using a recognized citation style such as APA , Chicago , or Harvard . Make sure to follow the guidelines closely so that your essay looks professional.

Following these steps will help you create an informative and well-structured science essay that meets the given criteria.

Tough Essay Due? Hire Tough Writers!

How to Structure a Science Essay?

A basic science essay structure includes an introduction, body, and conclusion.

Let's look at each of these briefly.

Introduction

Your essay introduction should introduce your topic and provide a brief overview of what you will discuss in the essay. It should also state your thesis or main argument.

For instance, a thesis statement for a science essay could be,

"The human body is capable of incredible feats, as evidenced by the many athletes who have competed in the Olympic games."

The body of your essay will contain the bulk of your argument or discussion. It should be divided into paragraphs, each discussing a different point.

For instance, imagine you were writing about sports and the human body.

Your first paragraph can discuss the physical capabilities of the human body.

The second paragraph may be about the physical benefits of competing in sports.

Similarly, in the third paragraph, you can present one or two case studies of specific athletes to support your point.

Once you have explained all your points in the body, it’s time to conclude the essay.

Your essay conclusion should summarize the main points of your essay and leave the reader with a sense of closure.

In the conclusion, you reiterate your thesis and sum up your arguments. You can also suggest implications or potential applications of the ideas discussed in the essay.

By following this structure, you will create a well-organized essay.

Check out a few example essays to see this structure in practice.

Science Essay Examples

A great way to get inspired when writing a science essay is to look at other examples of successful essays written by others.

Here are some examples that will give you an idea of how to write your essay.

Science Essay About Genetics - Science Essay Example

Environmental Science Essay Example | PDF Sample

The Science of Nanotechnology

Science, Non-Science, and Pseudo-Science

The Science Of Science Education

Science in our Daily Lives

Short Science Essay Example

Let’s take a look at a short science essay:

Want to read more essay examples? Here, you can find more science essay examples to learn from.

How to Choose the Right Science Essay Topic

Choosing the right science essay topic is a critical first step in crafting a compelling and engaging essay. Here's a concise guide on how to make this decision wisely:

Consider Your Interests: Start by reflecting on your personal interests within the realm of science. Selecting a topic that genuinely fascinates you will make the research and writing process more enjoyable and motivated.
Relevance to the Course: Ensure that your chosen topic aligns with your course or assignment requirements. Read the assignment guidelines carefully to understand the scope and focus expected by your instructor.
Current Trends and Issues: Stay updated with the latest scientific developments and trends. Opting for a topic that addresses contemporary issues not only makes your essay relevant but also demonstrates your awareness of current events in the field.
Narrow Down the Scope: Science is vast, so narrow your topic to a manageable scope. Instead of a broad subject like "Climate Change," consider a more specific angle like "The Impact of Melting Arctic Ice on Global Sea Levels."
Available Resources: Ensure that there are sufficient credible sources and research materials available for your chosen topic. A lack of resources can hinder your research efforts.
Discuss with Your Instructor: If you're uncertain about your topic choice, don't hesitate to consult your instructor or professor. They can provide valuable guidance and may even suggest specific topics based on your academic goals.

Science Essay Topics

Choosing an appropriate topic for a science essay is one of the first steps in writing a successful paper.

Here are a few science essay topics to get you started:

How space exploration affects our daily lives?
How has technology changed our understanding of medicine?
Are there ethical considerations to consider when conducting scientific research?
How does climate change affect the biodiversity of different parts of the world?
How can artificial intelligence be used in medicine?
What impact have vaccines had on global health?
What is the future of renewable energy?
How do we ensure that genetically modified organisms are safe for humans and the environment?
The influence of social media on human behavior: A social science perspective
What are the potential risks and benefits of stem cell therapy?

Important science topics can cover anything from space exploration to chemistry and biology. So you can choose any topic according to your interests!

Need more topics? We have gathered 100+ science essay topics to help you find a great topic!

Continue reading to find some tips to help you write a successful science essay.

Science Essay Writing Tips

Once you have chosen a topic and looked at examples, it's time to start writing the science essay.

Here are some key tips for a successful essay:

Research thoroughly

Make sure you do extensive research before you begin writing your paper. This will ensure that the facts and figures you include are accurate and supported by reliable sources.

Use clear language

Avoid using jargon or overly technical language when writing your essay. Plain language is easier to understand and more engaging for readers.

Referencing

Always provide references for any information you include in your essay. This will demonstrate that you acknowledge other people's work and show that the evidence you use is credible.

Make sure to follow the basic structure of an essay and organize your thoughts into clear sections. This will improve the flow and make your essay easier to read.

Ask someone to proofread

It’s also a good idea to get someone else to proofread your work as they may spot mistakes that you have missed.

These few tips will help ensure that your science essay is well-written and informative!

You've learned the steps to writing a successful science essay and looked at some examples and topics to get you started.

Make sure you thoroughly research, use clear language, structure your thoughts, and proofread your essay. With these tips, you’re sure to write a great science essay!

Do you still need expert help writing a science essay? Our science essay writing service is here to help. With our team of professional writers, you can rest assured that your essay will be written to the highest standards.

Contact our essay service now to get started!

Also, do not forget to try our essay typer tool for quick and cost-free aid with your essays!

Write Essay Within 60 Seconds!

Betty is a freelance writer and researcher. She has a Masters in literature and enjoys providing writing services to her clients. Betty is an avid reader and loves learning new things. She has provided writing services to clients from all academic levels and related academic fields.

Paper Due? Why Suffer? That’s our Job!

Keep reading

Essays About Earth: 7 Essay Examples And Topic Ideas

There are many things you need to know about our planet, so if you’re making essays about Earth, you can read these sample essays and topic ideas.

The planet Earth is where we, humans, and other living creatures live. It also provides us with all the necessities we need – air to breathe, water to drink, and soil to grow fruits and vegetables. Without its natural resources, life would be impossible for all of us.

Writing an essay about Earth can help give knowledge and spread awareness about climate change or look at the beauty of our planet. If you are writing an essay about the Earth, here are some essay examples and topic ideas to help you get started.

Tip: If you want to use the latest grammar software, read our guide to using an AI grammar checker .

1. Short Essay On The Structure Of Planet Earth By Shyam Soni

2. interest and concern about the fate of the earth by john olson, 3. our planet in danger by derrick wells, 4. a planet without trees: a nightmare or our future by shannon cain, 5. the possibility of an asteroid falling to earth by lewis rios, 6. save earth before colonizing mars by luz estrada, 7. my earth, my responsibility by poonam ghimire, topic idea essays about earth, 1. are there more planets like earth, 2. how has the earth’s surface changed over the years, 3. causes and effects of global warming, 4. does planting trees and reforestation help limit global warming, 5. how does population growth affect earth’s climate change, 6. human impacts on the planet earth, 7. how did the planet earth form.

“Direct observation of the interior of the Earth is not possible as the interior becomes hotter with depth which is convincingly indicated by the volcanic eruptions. Apart from the seismological studies, other important sources of data, even though indirect, logically prove that the Earth’s body comprises several layers, which are like shells resting one above the other. These layers are distinguished by their physical and chemical properties, particularly, their thickness, depth, density, temperature, metallic content, and rocks.”

Author Shyam Soni discusses some essential facts about the structure of the planet Earth. This essay focuses on its layered structure and the differences in the density and temperature at different depths.

“I have found myself increasingly interested and concerned with the fate of the Earth and the way humankind views sustainability. In my perspective, many humans believe that Earth’s materials and resources are infinite, they will always be there to feed and maintain human life. The Earth will endlessly support and provide for the needs of the humans that inhabit it. Yet, that is just simply not true, as the human population grows we use more and more of the natural resources Earth provides.”

Author John Olson shares his point of view about the Earth’s “infinite” resources and its sustainability. However, Olson tells us that it may not be as unlimited as we think because of the rapid growth of the human population.

“Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in the 18th century that started in England, the people during those times were already writing down the blueprint for a problem that the succeeding generations will have to face – the increasing problem of Carbon Dioxide emissions in our atmosphere. Carbon dioxide (CO2) is released in tons, millions of tons every day in every country – released from various factories and cars most especially. This buildup of toxic gases such as the carbon dioxide heats up our planet thereby increasing the possibility, and the danger of global warming – this is what we call the greenhouse effect.”

Author Derrick Wells talks about one of the environmental problems we are facing today – the Greenhouse Effect and the actions that we could take to save our planet Earth from the danger it can pose.

“Can we imagine a world without trees? What a world without trees would look like? Could such a world even exist? Let us close our eyes, and try to imagine a desolate Earth. Imagine no more paper, and everyone would have to resort to some other source or maybe technology could help, but that is, if anyone was left at that time. Trees are an important factor to our existence not only because they produce paper, lumber, or chewing gum, but due to the fact that they serve an important role in the carbon cycle, they are the key to our very existence! Due to the ever increasing population, that seemingly distant future is getting near each passing day.”

Author Shannon Cain shares his thought about a planet without trees, telling us what it would be like and what we can do to prevent it from happening to our home planet – the Earth.

“Jonathan Haidt gave a speech about the possibility of an asteroid falling on Earth and asked the audience what people could do to stop them. Haidt notes that if an asteroid threatens to destroy the Earth, people will forget about their differences and stand together to fight for their survival. This is what he refers a common ground in the midst of a crisis. Haidt’s video shows us the many problems that people are facing, but yet people cannot find a common ground to fight them while the issues are threatening all of us.”

Author Lewis Rios talks about the possibility of an asteroid falling on Earth and then relates it to some common problems we are facing right now. Such as poverty, which tells us that we should all cooperate and work together to find a solution to these threats to survive.

“Has humanity irreversibly defaced Earth from being a sustainable planet for further centuries? Many would believe that humanity has come to a point of constant destruction of Earth with no hope for change. This thought process has come forth with the resolution of starting a new sustainable planet on Mars. However, it is tremendously more challenging to restart than to fix damage and change simplistic daily routines.”

Author Luz Estrada shares her opinion about the plan of starting a new sustainable planet on Mars. Estrada shares with the readers that it is much easier to save and fix Earth – as it is now – rather than thinking of starting a new life on a different planet, which is impossible for most people.

“Earth is a beautiful living planet in the Universe and the common habitat of more than 7 billion human population and millions of species of biodiversity. Our Earth provides us with food, shelter, and most of our requirements. Despite unavoidable free services provided by the earth to humans, we are not able to pay off her kindness to us. Rather we humans are being cruel to our Earth with our selfish activities.”

Author Poonam Ghimire talks about the selfish acts that cause Earth’s slow destruction. Ghimire encourages the readers to be responsible enough to protect and preserve our planet for the next generations.

Earth, our home, is the only planet known to support life, although there are current missions determining Mars’ past and future potential for life. While scientists continue to look for signs of life elsewhere in the universe, Earth remains the only place where we’ve ever identified living creatures. If you are writing an essay about the Earth, you can use this topic idea to discuss some Earth-like planets discovered so far.

The planet Earth has not always looked the same way it looks today; the United States, a billion years ago, was in a completely different location compared to where it is today! So, how does this happen? Why does this happen? In your essay about the Earth, you can use this topic idea to give the readers some understanding of how our planet has changed over time – like the things that took place and are still taking place.

Recent global warming is mainly because of human actions, which involve releasing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. An increase in greenhouse gases leads to a more significant greenhouse effect, which results in increased global warming. Global warming is also being felt everywhere – drought, heatwaves, melting glaciers, rising sea levels, and storms. If you are writing an essay about the Earth, you can discuss this topic in more detail to spread awareness to your readers out there.

Essays About Earth: Does planting trees and reforestation help limit global warming

Planting more trees is one of the most effective ways to lessen atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) and stop global warming. As the forests grow, they remove the carbon dioxide from the air through photosynthesis, which works as a natural reservoir to store carbon. Reforestation, one of the planned projects worldwide, is thought to help protect the environment for the next generations. You can use this topic idea for your essay about the Earth to encourage your readers to plant more trees to reduce the harmful effects of deforestation and save our home planet, Earth, from getting slowly destroyed.

Since humans require fossil fuels to power their increasingly mechanized lifestyles, human population growth is undoubtedly a significant contributor to global warming. More people mean more demand for oil, gas, coal, and other underground fuels that, when burned, release enough carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere to trap warm air inside like a greenhouse. So, in your essay about the Earth, let your readers know to what extent human population growth affects climate change and what can be done about it.

Humans affect the planet Earth in many ways – overpopulation, pollution, burning fossil fuels, and deforestation. These things have caused global warming, soil erosion, poor air quality, and non-potable water. In your essay about the Earth, you can detail these negative impacts and how they can affect us, humans.

The planet Earth’s formation remains a bizarre, scientific mystery. This is because we live on a planet in a solar system with seven other planets, and thousands of exoplanets have been discovered so far. However, the formation of planets like Earth is still a hotly debated topic. So, currently, there are only 2 leading theories about planetary formation – in your essay about the earth, look into this topic in more detail to share some exciting facts about the Earth with your readers.

If you’re stuck picking your next essay topic, check out our guide on how to write a diverse essay.

If you’re still stuck, check out our general resource of essay writing topics .

Bryan Collins is the owner of Become a Writer Today. He's an author from Ireland who helps writers build authority and earn a living from their creative work. He's also a former Forbes columnist and his work has appeared in publications like Lifehacker and Fast Company.

View all posts

What Earth Science Is and Reasons to Study It

There are many types of Earth science, including the study of Earth's inner layers.

How to Become an Earth Scientist and Why

Getty Images

The diversity of topics under the earth science umbrella makes the field special, according to scholars within the discipline.

Someone fascinated by natural objects like glaciers and crystals or awestruck by scenic landscapes ranging from deserts to swamps should be aware of an academic discipline that focuses on solving the mysteries surrounding Earth's history and destiny.

What Earth Science Is and What Earth Scientists Do

Earth science concentrates on investigating how the planet works and why. This field delves into the many layers of the Earth and explains how those pieces fit together into a cohesive structure. The interdisciplinary subject not only provides insight into the mechanics of the solid parts of the planet, but also illustrates the inner workings of the liquid and gaseous portions. It addresses questions about the origins and evolution of the atmosphere, various land formations and bodies of water.

This branch of science includes research into what the globe might have looked like in the past, the way it might appear in the future and how it fits into the universe as a whole, which facilitates comparisons with other planets like Venus and Mars.

Earth science is inextricably connected to astronomy , which is the study of outer space, since the behavior of the sun and moon influences conditions on Earth and there are many space hazards that could potentially destroy the Earth, such as asteroids and comets.

Earth science is highly relevant to the welfare of humanity, as it allows people to predict and prepare for natural disasters such as hurricanes and volcanic eruptions. It also helps people locate and extract valuable raw materials that are hidden underground, ranging from fresh water and fossil fuels to minerals and precious metals.

"From where certain crops prefer to grow, to why there’s a hill on the horizon, to the shape of the coastline, every natural feature on a landscape can be explained through Earth Sciences," Gemma Cassidy, who has a Ph.D. degree in earth science, wrote in an email. "Beyond the natural world, an Earth Scientist will have been involved in getting the electricity and/or gas in your home and the petrol/diesel into your car, as well as finding the rare earth elements for your smart phone. Perhaps most crucially, it is Earth Scientists who work to understand where is safe for us to live, and help to assess how you mitigate risk in a city in a volcano/earthquake/hurricane-prone area."

Types of Earth Science

Here are some of the major categories within earth science, an enormous academic discipline that encompasses multiple areas of study.

Atmospheric science
Climatology or climate science
Environmental science
Geochemistry
Geochronology
Geomorphology
Meteorology
Oceanography
Paleontology
Stratigraphy
Volcanology

Steven A. Hauck II, professor and chair of earth, environmental and planetary sciences at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio, notes that some earth scientists concentrate on water while others focus on oceans or rocks. Earth scientists may examine the Earth's core or its magnetic field, he says.

How to Become an Earth Scientist

Although a majority of earth scientists have a bachelor's degree, this credential isn't a requirement for all earth science jobs. "Most earth scientists have a four-year college degree," Hauck says. "I wouldn't say all."

Aspiring earth scientists should plan to pursue a four-year degree in this area, he says, and some types of earth science occupations may demand graduate education. A master's or doctorate is usually necessary for a research career, Hauck explains.

Doug Gouzie, a professor of geology at Missouri State University , advises future earth scientists to get a "good, solid foundation" in math and chemistry , since knowledge of both those areas is valuable within the earth science field.

What You Can Do With an Earth Science Degree

An earth science degree is marketable within the energy and mining industries. The credential is also helpful within positions that focus on environmental sustainability and that which can be based at government agencies or private-sector companies, Hauck says.

"Earth science is a really broad field," he explains. "It's not just about rocks or fossils. It's about understanding the world around us and how it works and so there are many different ways of doing that."

Cassidy, who oversees various scientific journals that relate to her field of study for the academic publisher Wiley, notes that earth scientists can find a variety of jobs.

"Oil, gas and mineral extraction have always been options for Earth Scientists, but there are a vast array of other careers available such as geoenvironmental work, geotechnical engineering, or hydrogeology," she says. "There is also the option to continue in a research career, and continue to study pressing topics like climate change or natural hazards. Other, less direct options include teaching, and of course, publishing."

What Makes Earth Science Unique

Curiosity about how Earth compares to other planets and what occurs below its surface led Hauck to study and learn about the differences and similarities between the Earth and other planets.

"Where we live is this really thin layer on top of an immense planet that's mostly beneath our feet, right? And so I was really excited about trying to connect what we see at the surface with what's happening in the 99% of the planet that's beneath our feet and trying to understand that," Hauck explains, adding that he was also intrigued by the possibility of analyzing extraterrestrial environments.

Gouzie says one of the best aspects of a job as an earth scientist is getting to go out and have adventures in interesting locations like caves and coastlines.

Unlike chemists who frequently use undiluted substances, earth scientists typically deal with raw materials with a hodgepodge of ingredients, Gouzie explains. "I get to see the variety of all the impurities – the imperfections – and I find that kind of neat, because it's kind of like psychologists dealing with people," he says. "You're not dealing with something that is pure and completely predictable."

The diversity of topics under the earth science umbrella makes the field special, according to scholars within the discipline. Earth science incorporates ideas from biology, chemistry and physics, so it tends to be a practical area of study, scholars say.

Gouzie once worked for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, researching landfill leakages, and he has investigated the way dangerous substances can move through groundwater and threaten the health of humans. He now focuses on caves and sinkholes. Because earth science examines tangible objects and addresses a wide array of issues, the field may be especially attractive to some aspiring scientists, especially those who would prefer to concentrate on concrete problems, he says.

There are some challenging aspects of earth science. For instance, certain inaccessible parts of the Earth, like its inner core, are impossible to observe directly. Scientists need to be creative about finding ways to deduce information about these remote regions, such as by monitoring seismic wave activity through machinery.

Additionally, earth scientists sometimes have to work in harsh or hazardous environments such as arctic or volcanic regions.

Rachel Barr, vice president of sustainability at UBQ Materials – an Israeli company that converts waste into recyclable thermoplastic – notes an urgent need for people to study earth science.

"There's never going to be enough people who have studied this and who are engaged in this area," says Barr, who earned a master's degree in environmental science at Yale University in Connecticut. "The more people involved, the better it is for the whole society, as well as the planet."

Searching for a grad school? Access our complete rankings of Best Graduate Schools.

Grad Degree Jobs With $100K+ Salaries

Tags: science , graduate schools , students , education , STEM , STEM education

Avoid Procrastinating in Medical School

Kathleen Franco, M.D., M.S. May 21, 2024

Good Law School Recommendation Letters

Gabriel Kuris May 20, 2024

Get Accepted to Multiple Top B-schools

Anayat Durrani May 16, 2024

Premeds and Emerging Medical Research

Zach Grimmett May 14, 2024

How to Get a Perfect Score on the LSAT

Gabriel Kuris May 13, 2024

Premeds Take 5 Public Health Courses

Rachel Rizal May 7, 2024

Fortune 500 CEOs With a Law Degree

Cole Claybourn May 7, 2024

Why It's Hard to Get Into Med School

A.R. Cabral May 6, 2024

Pros, Cons of Unaccredited Law Schools

Gabriel Kuris May 6, 2024

If you're seeing this message, it means we're having trouble loading external resources on our website.

If you're behind a web filter, please make sure that the domains *.kastatic.org and *.kasandbox.org are unblocked.

To log in and use all the features of Khan Academy, please enable JavaScript in your browser.

Biology library

Course: biology library > unit 1.

Preparing to study biology
Biology overview

What is life?

Introduction

Properties of life, 1. organization, 2. metabolism, 3. homeostasis, 5. reproduction, 6. response, 7. evolution, is this the definitive list, separating living and non-living things, what counts as life is still being defined., what do you think, works cited:.

Eveleth, R. "There Are 37.2 Trillion Cells in Your Body." Smithsonian.com. October 24, 2013. http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/there-are-372-trillion-cells-in-your-body-4941473/?no-ist .
Koshland, D. E. "The Seven Pillars of Life." Science 295, no. 5563 (2002): 2215-216. http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1068489 .
Mullen, L. "Defining Life: Q&A with Scientist Gerald Joyce." Space.com. August 1, 2013. http://www.space.com/22210-life-definition-gerald-joyce-interview.html .

References:

Suggestions for further reading, want to join the conversation.

Upvote Button navigates to signup page
Downvote Button navigates to signup page
Flag Button navigates to signup page

American Geosciences Institute

Earth science benefits everyone.

Our lives and civilization depend upon how we understand and manage our planet—Earth processes affect us all. Weather patterns influence the availability of water resources and the potential for forest fires; Earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, hurricanes, and floods can kill large numbers of people and cause millions or even billions of dollars in property damage.

Just as Earth systems directly affect each of us, we – as individuals, communities and nations—affect our planet. Expanding technologies and growing populations increase demand on natural resources. As we extract and use these resources, we have an impact on Earth today, which will in turn affect those who come after us. To enhance our stewardship of the environment, we must proceed into the future with a sound understanding of Earth systems.

Earth science knowledge enables us to think globally and act locally— to make sound decisions about issues important in our lives as individuals and citizens. People who understand how Earth systems work can make informed decisions about where to buy or build a home out of harm’s way. They can debate and resolve issues surrounding clean water, urban planning and development, national security, global climate change, and the use and management of natural resources.

An informed society, conscious of our complex relationships with our planet, recognizes the importance of and insists on Earth science education at all grade levels— elementary, secondary, and adult education. When we emphasize Earth science education, everyone benefits.

Board of Directors
AGI Connections Newsletter
Nominations
News and Announcements
Membership Benefits
Strategic Plan
Annual Report
Member Societies
Member Society Council
International Associates
Trade Associates
Academic Associates
Regional Associates
Liaison Organizations
Community Documents
Geoscience Calendar
Center for Geoscience & Society
Education & Outreach
Diversity Activities
Policy & Critical Issues
Scholarly Information
Geoscience Profession
Earth Science Week
Publication Store
Glossary of Geology
Earth Science Week Toolkit
I'm a Geoscientist
Free Geoscience Resources
AGI Connections
Be a Visiting Geoscientist
Use Our Workspace

10 Things We’ve Learned About the Earth Since Last Earth Day

Pigeon-eating catfish, Antarctic trash, and more: A list of surprising, alarming and exciting discoveries about our planet from the past year

Joseph Stromberg

Last year, to celebrate the 42nd Earth Day, we took a look at 10 of the most surprising, disheartening, and exciting things we’d learned about our home planet in the previous year—a list that included discoveries about the role pesticides play in bee colony collapses , the various environmental stresses faced by the world’s oceans and the millions of unknown species are still out in the environment, waiting to be found.

Image via NASA/NOAA/GSFC/Suomi NPP/VIIRS/Norman Kuring

This year, in time for Earth Day on Monday, we’ve done it again, putting together another list of 10 notable discoveries made by scientists since Earth Day 2012—a list that ranges from specific topics (a species of plant, a group of catfish) to broad (the core of planet Earth), and from the alarming (the consequences of climate change) to the awe-inspiring (Earth’s place in the universe).

Even the supposedly pristine Antarctic landscape is marred by trash heaps. Image via Germany Federal Environment Agency Report (PDF)

1. Trash is accumulating everywhere, even in Antarctica . As we’ve explored the most remote stretches of the planet, we’ve consistently left behind a trail of one supply in particular: garbage. Even in Antarctica, a February study found ( PDF ), abandoned field huts and piles of trash are mounting. Meanwhile, in the fall, a new research expedition went to study the Great Pacific Garbage Patch , counting nearly 70,000 pieces of garbage over the course of a month at sea.

2. Climate change could erode the ozone layer . Until recently, atmospheric scientists viewed climate change and the disintegration of the ozone layer as entirely distinct problems. Then, in July, Harvard researcher Jim Anderson ( who won a Smithsonian Ingenuity Award for his work ) led a team that published the troubling finding that the two might be linked. Some warm summer storms, they discovered, can pull moisture up into the stratosphere, an atmospheric layer 6 miles up. Through a chain of chemical reactions, this moisture can lead to the disintegration of ozone, which is crucial for protecting us from ultraviolet (UV) radiation. Climate change, unfortunately, is projected to cause more of these sorts of storms.

3. This flower lives on exactly two cliffs in Spain . In September, Spanish scientists told us about one of the most astounding survival stories in the plant kingdom: Borderea chouardii , an extremely rare flowering plant that is found on only two adjacent cliffs in the Pyrenees. The species is believed to be a relic of the Tertiary Period , which ended more than 2 million years ago, and relies on several different local ant species to spread pollen between its two local populations.

4. Some catfish have learned to kill pigeons . In December, a group of French scientists revealed a phenomenon they’d carefully been observing over the previous year: a group of catfish in Southwestern France had learned how to leap onto shore, briefly strand themselves, and swim back into the water to consume their prey. With more than 2,000,000 Youtube views so far, this is clearly one of the year’s most widely enjoyed scientific discoveries.

5. Fracking for natural gas can trigger moderate earthquakes. Scientists have known for a while that whenever oil and gas are extracted from the ground at a large scale, seismic activity can be induced. Over the past few years, evidence has mounted that injecting water , sand and chemicals into bedrock to cause gas and oil to flow upward—a practice commonly known as fracking—can cause earthquakes by lubricating pre-existing faults in the ground. Initially, scientists found correlations between fracking sites and the number of small earthquakes in particular areas. Then, in March, other researchers found evidence that a medium-sized 2011 earthquake in Oklahoma(which registered a 5.7 on the moment magnitude scale ) was likely caused by injecting wastewater into wells to extract oil.

6. Our planet’s inner core is more complicated than we thought . Despite decades of research, new data on the iron and nickel ball 3,100 miles beneath our feet continue to upset our assumptions about just how the earth’s core operates. A paper published last May showed that iron in the outer parts of the inner core is losing heat much more quickly than previously estimated, suggesting that it might hold more radioactive energy than we’d assumed, or that novel and unknown chemical interactions are occurring. Ideas for directly probing the core are widely regarded as pipe dreams, so our only options remains studying it from afar, largely by monitoring seismic waves.

The berries of Pollia condensata were found to produce the most intense color in the natural world. Image via PNAS

7. The world’s most intense natural color comes from an African fruit . When a team of researchers looked closely at the blue berries of Pollia condensata , a wild plant that grows in East Africa, they found something unexpected : it uses an uncommon structural coloration method to produce the most intense natural color ever measured. Instead of pigments, the fruit’s brilliant blue results from nanoscale-size cellulose strands layered in twisting shapes, which which interact with each other to scatter light in all directions.

8. Climate change will let ships cruise across the North Pole . Climate change is sure to create countless problems for many people around the world, but one specific group is likely to see a significant benefit from it: international shipping companies. A study published last month found that rising temperatures make it probable that during summertime, reinforced ice-breaking ships will be able to sail directly across the North Pole—an area currently covered by up to 65 feet of ice—by the year 2040. This dramatic shift will shorten shipping routes from North America and Europe to Asia.

9. One bacteria species conducts electricity . In October, a group of Danish researchers revealed that the seafloor mud of Aarhus’ harbor was coursing with electricity due to an unlikely source: mutlicellular bacteria that behave like tiny electrical cables. The organisms, the team found, built structures that traveled several centimeters down into the sediment and conduct measurable levels of electricity. The researchers speculate that this seemingly strange behavior is a byproduct of the way of the bacteria harvests energy from the nutrients buried in the soil.

Kepler 62f, discovered yesterday, is the most promising exoplanet candidate yet in terms of its potential to harbor life. Image via NASA/Ames/JPL-Caltech

10. Our Earth isn’t alone . Okay, this one might not technically be a discovery about Earth, but over the past year we have learned a tremendous amount about what our Earth isn’t: the only habitable planet in the visible universe. The pace of exoplanet detection has accelerated rapidly, with a total of 866 planets in other solar systems discovered so far. As our methods have become more refined, we’ve been able to detect smaller and smaller planets, and just yesterday, scientists finally discovered a pair of distant planets in the habitable zone of their stars that are relatively close in size to Earth, making it more likely than ever that we might have spied an alien planet that actually supports life.

Get the latest Science stories in your inbox.

Joseph Stromberg | | READ MORE

Joseph Stromberg was previously a digital reporter for Smithsonian .

Essay on Earth

500 words essay on earth.

The earth is the planet that we live on and it is the fifth-largest planet. It is positioned in third place from the Sun. This essay on earth will help you learn all about it in detail. Our earth is the only planet that can sustain humans and other living species. The vital substances such as air, water, and land make it possible.

All About Essay on Earth

The rocks make up the earth that has been around for billions of years. Similarly, water also makes up the earth. In fact, water covers 70% of the surface. It includes the oceans that you see, the rivers, the sea and more.

Thus, the remaining 30% is covered with land. The earth moves around the sun in an orbit and takes around 364 days plus 6 hours to complete one round around it. Thus, we refer to it as a year.

Just like revolution, the earth also rotates on its axis within 24 hours that we refer to as a solar day. When rotation is happening, some of the places on the planet face the sun while the others hide from it.

As a result, we get day and night. There are three layers on the earth which we know as the core, mantle and crust. The core is the centre of the earth that is usually very hot. Further, we have the crust that is the outer layer. Finally, between the core and crust, we have the mantle i.e. the middle part.

The layer that we live on is the outer one with the rocks. Earth is home to not just humans but millions of other plants and species. The water and air on the earth make it possible for life to sustain. As the earth is the only livable planet, we must protect it at all costs.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

There is No Planet B

The human impact on the planet earth is very dangerous. Through this essay on earth, we wish to make people aware of protecting the earth. There is no balance with nature as human activities are hampering the earth.

Needless to say, we are responsible for the climate crisis that is happening right now. Climate change is getting worse and we need to start getting serious about it. It has a direct impact on our food, air, education, water, and more.

The rising temperature and natural disasters are clear warning signs. Therefore, we need to come together to save the earth and leave a better planet for our future generations.

Being ignorant is not an option anymore. We must spread awareness about the crisis and take preventive measures to protect the earth. We must all plant more trees and avoid using non-biodegradable products.

Further, it is vital to choose sustainable options and use reusable alternatives. We must save the earth to save our future. There is no Planet B and we must start acting like it accordingly.

Conclusion of Essay on Earth

All in all, we must work together to plant more trees and avoid using plastic. It is also important to limit the use of non-renewable resources to give our future generations a better planet.

FAQ on Essay on Earth

Question 1: What is the earth for kids?

Answer 1: Earth is the third farthest planet from the sun. It is bright and bluish in appearance when we see it from outer space. Water covers 70% of the earth while land covers 30%. Moreover, the earth is the only planet that can sustain life.

Question 2: How can we protect the earth?

Answer 2: We can protect the earth by limiting the use of non-renewable resources. Further, we must not waste water and avoid using plastic.

Customize your course in 30 seconds

Which class are you in.

Travelling Essay
Picnic Essay
Our Country Essay
My Parents Essay
Essay on Favourite Personality
Essay on Memorable Day of My Life
Essay on Knowledge is Power
Essay on Gurpurab
Essay on My Favourite Season
Essay on Types of Sports

Download the App

Publications

Analysis & Opinions
News & Announcements
Newsletters
Policy Briefs & Testimonies
Presentations & Speeches
Reports & Papers
Quarterly Journal: International Security
Artificial Intelligence
Conflict & Conflict Resolution
Coronavirus
Economics & Global Affairs
Environment & Climate Change
International Relations
International Security & Defense
Nuclear Issues
Science & Technology
Student Publications
War in Ukraine
Asia & the Pacific
Middle East & North Africa
North America
South America
Infographics & Charts

US-Russian Contention in Cyberspace

The overarching question imparting urgency to this exploration is: Can U.S.-Russian contention in cyberspace cause the two nuclear superpowers to stumble into war? In considering this question we were constantly reminded of recent comments by a prominent U.S. arms control expert: At least as dangerous as the risk of an actual cyberattack, he observed, is cyber operations’ “blurring of the line between peace and war.” Or, as Nye wrote, “in the cyber realm, the difference between a weapon and a non-weapon may come down to a single line of code, or simply the intent of a computer program’s user.”

A consumer hydrogen fuel pump in Germany

The Geopolitics of Renewable Hydrogen

Renewables are widely perceived as an opportunity to shatter the hegemony of fossil fuel-rich states and democratize the energy landscape. Virtually all countries have access to some renewable energy resources (especially solar and wind power) and could thus substitute foreign supply with local resources. Our research shows, however, that the role countries are likely to assume in decarbonized energy systems will be based not only on their resource endowment but also on their policy choices.

What Comes After the Forever Wars

As the United States emerges from the era of so-called forever wars, it should abandon the regime change business for good. Then, Washington must understand why it failed, writes Stephen Walt.

Telling Black Stories: What We All Can Do

Full event video and after-event thoughts from the panelists.

Defense, Emerging Technology, and Strategy
Diplomacy and International Politics
Environment and Natural Resources
International Security
Science, Technology, and Public Policy
Africa Futures Project
Applied History Project
Arctic Initiative
Asia-Pacific Initiative
Cyber Project
Defending Digital Democracy
Defense Project
Economic Diplomacy Initiative
Future of Diplomacy Project
Geopolitics of Energy Project
Harvard Project on Climate Agreements
Homeland Security Project
Intelligence Project
Korea Project
Managing the Atom
Middle East Initiative
Project on Europe and the Transatlantic Relationship
Security and Global Health
Technology and Public Purpose
US-Russia Initiative to Prevent Nuclear Terrorism

Special Initiatives

American Secretaries of State
An Economic View of the Environment
Cuban Missile Crisis
Russia Matters
Thucydides's Trap

Technology and Policy

Innovation at work.

Blog Post - Technology and Policy

Sujata K. Bhatia

Today is a special day, not only because you are graduating, but also because you are entering the community of life scientists. Why pursue the life sciences? The pursuit of any scientific endeavor is noble, but the life sciences are particularly special. There are obvious practical reasons that the life sciences are valuable. The study of the life sciences lends important insights into disease processes, and allows the development of novel therapeutics and innovative medical devices, thereby directly improving human health. The life sciences also enable an understanding of the environment and the other living species with whom we share the earth; this knowledge guides conservation efforts and literally helps us to save our shared planet.

Yet there are deeper reasons for studying the life sciences. The life sciences empower us to answer fundamental questions about ourselves – Where did we come from? What are we made of? What is the basis for the miracle of our existence? What is our place in the natural world, in the tree of life? Walking in the Maine woods, Henry David Thoreau wrote, “Talk of mysteries! — Think of our life in nature,—daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it, — rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! the solid earth! the actual world! the common sense! Contact! Contact! Who are we? where are we?” Thoreau was a great naturalist, and he realized that the life sciences reveal the truth of our existence; the life sciences shine a light on our real identities, so that we discover our true reality.

Through the life sciences, we have learned that we all part of the human family, sharing the same basic genetic material. Indeed, we are not just the stuff that dreams are made on, we are the stuff that DNA is made on. We share the same molecular building blocks, derived from the same star dust. Moreover, the living species that surround us are not only our companions on earth, but also our ancestors. If science is the search for truth, then there are no greater truths than these. In fact, the life sciences provide the most powerful arguments we have, for the most important issues of our society, issues such as social justice, environmental preservation, animal protection, world peace, and fundamental human rights.

It is precisely for these reasons that the life sciences draws in knowledge-seekers and truth-seekers from diverse backgrounds. Because the life sciences reveal such central truths, the best scientific and engineering minds in history, regardless of discipline, eventually turn their attention to the biological sciences. For instance, the prodigious engineer, architect, and painter Leonardo da Vinci, gained formal training in the anatomy of the human body, studying the muscles and tendons, and laying the foundations for modern biomechanics. The brilliant chemist Linus Pauling, once he had elucidated the nature of the chemical bond and introduced the concept of orbital hybridization and founded quantum chemistry, subsequently sought to determine the nature of biological molecules such as proteins; he wanted to know the structure of hemoglobin, the molecule coursing through our blood vessels. His findings laid the groundwork for molecular biology and molecular genetics. Even the great physicist Erwin Schrodinger, after making ground-breaking discoveries in quantum theory and formulating the wave equation and winning a Nobel Prize for Physics, ultimately pursued the life sciences, looking at biological phenomena from the point of view of physics. In his book entitled, “What is Life?” Schrodinger asked, “How can the events in space and time which take place within the spatial boundary of a living organism be accounted for by physics and chemistry?” Indeed, all roads lead to the biological sciences.

Throughout my own education, I have felt the pull of the life sciences. In fact, the renowned chemical engineer and National Academy of Engineering member John M. Prausnitz has noted, “If engineering is the application of science for human benefit, then the engineer must be a student not only of the application of science, but of human benefit as well.” Now that I teach biomedical engineering undergraduates at Harvard, I rely on my life sciences background to train students in quantitative physiology, tissue engineering, and drug delivery. At every step of my career, my knowledge of life sciences has opened up a new world, giving me a unique way of solving problems.

So graduates, you should always be proud of your decision to study the life sciences; it is an honorable and relevant pursuit; the world needs you now, more than ever. Never forget the inspiration that drove you to study the life sciences in the first place. Your own life will be filled with challenges, ones that you cannot even anticipate now. But if you always remember that childlike sense of wonder that inspired your love of biology, you will never be lost. Instead of running a road race with others, look out into the forest, look out into the field, take in the entire landscape, look inside at yourself, and then beat your own path through the grass and leaves and trees; then you’re only racing against yourself. Project your sense of service and your love of biological science outward to others, but let your sense of achievement and success be guided by your own internal compass. Finally, wherever you go and whatever you do, never forget that you have the power to bring about positive change in the world. Congratulations.

This post is drawn from Sujata Bhatia’s commencement speech at the University of Delaware Department of Biological Sciences.

Former Associate, Science, Technology, and Globalization, January 2013–June 2017
Bio/Profile
More by this author

Belfer center email updates, belfer center of science and international affairs.

79 John F. Kennedy Street, Cambridge, MA 02138 (617) 495-1400

share this!

May 20, 2024

This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies . Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility:

fact-checked

peer-reviewed publication

trusted source

Did Earth's multicellular life depend on plate tectonics?

by Laurence Tognetti, Universe Today

How did complex life emerge and evolve on the Earth and what does this mean for finding life beyond Earth?

This is what a recent study published in Scientific Reports hopes to address, as a pair of researchers investigated how plate tectonics, oceans, and continents are responsible for the emergence and evolution of complex life across our planet and how this could address the Fermi Paradox while attempting to improve the Drake Equation regarding why we haven't found life in the universe and the parameters for finding life, respectively.

This study holds the potential to help researchers better understand the criterion for finding life beyond Earth, specifically pertaining to the geological processes exhibited on Earth.

Here, Universe Today discusses this study with Dr. Taras Gerya, who is a professor of earth sciences at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH-Zurich) and co-author of the study, regarding the motivation behind the study, significant results, follow-up studies, what this means for the Drake Equation, and the study's implications for finding life beyond Earth.

So, what was the motivation behind this study?

Dr. Gerya tells Universe Today, "It was motivated by the Fermi Paradox ("Where is everybody?") pointing out that the Drake Equation typically predicts that there are from 1,000 to 100,000,000 actively communicating civilizations in our galaxy, which is too optimistic of an estimate. We tried to figure out what may need to be corrected in this equation to make the prediction with the Drake Equation more realistic."

For the study, the research duo compared two types of planetary tectonic processes: single lid (also called stagnant lid) and plate tectonics. Single lid refers to a planetary body that does not exhibit plate tectonics and cannot be broken into separate plates that exhibit movement by sliding towards each other (convergent), sliding past each other (transform), or slide away from each other (divergent).

This lack of plate tectonic activity is often attributed to a planetary body's lid being too strong and dense to be broken apart. In the end, the researchers estimated that 75% of planetary bodies that exhibit active convection within their interiors do not exhibit plate tectonics and possess single lid tectonics, with Earth being the only planet that exhibits plate tectonics. Therefore, they concluded that single lid tectonics "is likely to dominate the tectonic styles of active silicate bodies in our galaxy," according to the study.

Additionally, the researchers investigated how planetary continents and oceans contribute to the evolution of intelligent life and technological civilizations. They noted the significance of life first evolving in oceans due to them being shielded from harmful space weather with single-celled life thriving in the oceans for the first few billion years of Earth's history.

However, the researchers also emphasize how dry land provides a myriad of benefits for the evolution of intelligent life, including adaptations to various terrains, such as eyes and new senses, which contributed to animals evolving for speed to hunt among other biological assets that enabled life to adapt to the various terrestrial environments across the planet.

In the end, the researchers concluded dry land helped contribute to the evolution of intelligent life across the planet, including abstract thinking, technology, and science. Therefore, what were the most significant results from this study, and what follow-up studies are currently in the works or being planned?

Dr. Gerya tells Universe Today, "That very special condition (>500 million years coexistence of continents, oceans, and plate tectonics) is needed on a planet with a primitive life in order to develop an intelligent technological communicative life. This condition is very rarely realized: only <0.003–0.2 % of planets with any life may satisfy this condition."

Dr. Gerya continues, "We plan to study water evolution in the planetary interior in order to understand how stability of surface ocean volume (implying stability of coexistence of oceans and continents) can be maintained for billions of years (like on Earth).

"We also plan to investigate the survival time of technological civilizations based on societal collapse models. We also started a project on the oxygenation state evolution of planetary interior and atmosphere in order to understand how oxygen-rich atmospheres (essential in particular for developing technological civilizations) can be formed on planets with oceans, continents and plate tectonics. Progress in these three directions is essential but will greatly depend on the availability of research funding."

As noted, this study was motivated and attempts to improve the Drake Equation, which proposes a multivariable equation that attempts to estimate the number of active, communicative civilizations (ACCs) that exist in the Milky Way Galaxy. It was proposed by in 1961 Dr. Frank Drake to postulate several notions that he encouraged the scientific community to consider when discussing both how and why we haven't heard from ACCs and reads as follows:

N = R* x f p x n e x f l x f i x f c x L

N = the number of technological civilizations in the Milky Way Galaxy who can potentially communicate with other worlds
R* = the average star formation rate in the Milky Way Galaxy
fp = the fraction of those stars with planets
ne = the average number of planets potentially capable of supporting life per star with planets
fl = the fraction of planets capable of supporting and developing life at some point in its history
fi = the fraction of planets that develop life and evolves into intelligent life
fc = the fraction of civilizations who develop technology capable of sending detectable signals into space
L = the length of time that technological civilizations send signals into space

According to the study, the Drake Equation estimates the number of ACCs range widely, between 200 to 50,000,000. As part of the study, the researchers proposed adding two additional variables to the Drake Equation based on their findings that plate tectonics, oceans, and continents have played a vital role in the development and evolution of complex life on Earth, which are as follows:

f oc = the fraction of habitable exoplanets that possess notable continents and oceans

f pt = the fraction of habitable exoplanets that possess notable continents and oceans that also exhibit plate tectonics that have been functioning for at least 500 million years

Using these two new variables, the study provided new estimates for fi (chances of planets that develop life and evolve into intelligent life). So, what is the importance of adding two new variables to the Drake Equation?

Dr. Gerya tells Universe Today, "This allowed us to re-define and estimate more correctly the key term of the Drake equation fi—probability of a planet with primitive life to develop an intelligent technological communicative life. Originally, fi was (incorrectly) estimated to be very high (100%). Our estimate is many orders of magnitude lower (<0.003–0.2 %), which likely explains why we are not contacted by other civilizations."

Additionally, when inputting these two new variables into the entire Drake Equation, the study estimates a far smaller number of ACCs at < 0.006 to 100,000, which is in stark contrast to the original estimates of the Drake Equation of 200 to 50,000,000. Therefore, what implications could this study have on the search for life beyond Earth?

Dr. Gerya tells Universe Today, "It has three key consequences: (1) we should not hope much that we will be contacted (probability of this is very low, in part because the life time of technological civilizations can be shorter than previously expected), (2) we should use remote sensing to look for planets with oceans, continents and plate tectonics (COPT planets) in our galaxy based on their likely distinct (CO 2 -poor) atmospheres and surface reflectivity signatures (due to the presence of oceans and continents), (3) we should take care about our own planet and civilization, both are extremely rare and must be preserved."

This study comes as the search for life beyond Earth continues to gain traction, with NASA having confirmed the existence of 5,630 exoplanets as of this writing, with almost 1,700 being classified as Super-Earths and 200 being classified as rocky exoplanets. Despite these incredible numbers, especially since exoplanets first started being discovered in the 1990s, humanity has yet to detect any type of signal from an extraterrestrial technological civilization, which this study referred to as ACCs.

Arguably the closest we have come to receiving a signal from outer space was the Wow! signal, which was a 72-second radio blast received by Ohio State University's Big Ear radio telescope on August 15, 1977. However, this signal has yet to be received since, along with a complete lack of signals at all. With this study, perhaps scientists can use these two new variables added to the Drake Equation to help narrow the scope of finding intelligent life beyond Earth.

Dr. Gerya concludes by telling Universe Today, "This research is part of an emerging new science—Biogeodynamics, which we try to support and develop. Biogeodynamics aims to understand and quantify relations between the long-term evolution of planetary interiors, surface, atmosphere, and life."

Journal information: Scientific Reports

Provided by Universe Today

Explore further

Feedback to editors

Study identifies high-performance alternative to conventional ferroelectrics

7 hours ago

Study reveals key role of plant-bacteria communication for assembly of a healthy plant microbiome

8 hours ago

Crows can deliberately plan how many calls to make, study shows

Novel liquid crystals produced by stacking antiaromatic units could lead to advances in organic semiconductors

Stress bragging may make you seem less competent, less likable at work

9 hours ago

Parents of the year: Scavenging raptors demonstrate high level of collaboration in raising chicks

Birdsong and human voice built from same genetic blueprint

Team develops an intelligent nanodevice based on a component of cinnamon essential oil as an antimicrobial agent

New 'atlas' provides unprecedented insights on how genes function in early embryo development

Researchers reveal dynamic structure of FLVCR proteins and their function in nutrient transport

10 hours ago

Relevant PhysicsForums posts

Will we ever communicate with extraterrestial life in a reasonable time frame.

6 hours ago

My photo of Jupiter (I think)

May 22, 2024

Dark matter and its effect on the orbit of stars

Our beautiful universe - photos and videos.

May 21, 2024

Predicting frequency of Earthlike planets and systems

Documenting the setup of my new telescope.

Mars had its own version of plate tectonics

Mar 2, 2024

Mathematical modelling sheds new light on how continents may have formed

Sep 13, 2019

What can early Earth teach us about the search for life?

May 7, 2024

A rocky relationship: A history of Earth's continents breaking up and getting back together

Aug 7, 2019

Plate tectonics not required for the emergence of life, argues study

Jun 14, 2023

How continents were recycled

Aug 23, 2017

Recommended for you

Potentially habitable 'exo-Venus' with Earth-like temperature discovered

14 hours ago

New Saturn-mass exoplanet detected by astronomers

15 hours ago

Earth 2.0 or its evil twin? Discovery of Earth-sized planet could shed light on conditions necessary for life

International planet hunters unveil massive catalog of strange worlds

NASA's Psyche fires up its sci-fi-worthy thrusters

Observations investigate properties of nearby brown dwarf HD 33632 Ab

Let us know if there is a problem with our content.

Use this form if you have come across a typo, inaccuracy or would like to send an edit request for the content on this page. For general inquiries, please use our contact form . For general feedback, use the public comments section below (please adhere to guidelines ).

Please select the most appropriate category to facilitate processing of your request

Thank you for taking time to provide your feedback to the editors.

Your feedback is important to us. However, we do not guarantee individual replies due to the high volume of messages.

E-mail the story

Your email address is used only to let the recipient know who sent the email. Neither your address nor the recipient's address will be used for any other purpose. The information you enter will appear in your e-mail message and is not retained by Phys.org in any form.

Newsletter sign up

Get weekly and/or daily updates delivered to your inbox. You can unsubscribe at any time and we'll never share your details to third parties.

More information Privacy policy

Donate and enjoy an ad-free experience

We keep our content available to everyone. Consider supporting Science X's mission by getting a premium account.

E-mail newsletter

Share full article

Supported by

Letter of Recommendation

What I’ve Learned From My Students’ College Essays

The genre is often maligned for being formulaic and melodramatic, but it’s more important than you think.

An illustration of a high school student with blue hair, dreaming of what to write in their college essay.

By Nell Freudenberger

Most high school seniors approach the college essay with dread. Either their upbringing hasn’t supplied them with several hundred words of adversity, or worse, they’re afraid that packaging the genuine trauma they’ve experienced is the only way to secure their future. The college counselor at the Brooklyn high school where I’m a writing tutor advises against trauma porn. “Keep it brief , ” she says, “and show how you rose above it.”

I started volunteering in New York City schools in my 20s, before I had kids of my own. At the time, I liked hanging out with teenagers, whom I sometimes had more interesting conversations with than I did my peers. Often I worked with students who spoke English as a second language or who used slang in their writing, and at first I was hung up on grammar. Should I correct any deviation from “standard English” to appeal to some Wizard of Oz behind the curtains of a college admissions office? Or should I encourage students to write the way they speak, in pursuit of an authentic voice, that most elusive of literary qualities?

In fact, I was missing the point. One of many lessons the students have taught me is to let the story dictate the voice of the essay. A few years ago, I worked with a boy who claimed to have nothing to write about. His life had been ordinary, he said; nothing had happened to him. I asked if he wanted to try writing about a family member, his favorite school subject, a summer job? He glanced at his phone, his posture and expression suggesting that he’d rather be anywhere but in front of a computer with me. “Hobbies?” I suggested, without much hope. He gave me a shy glance. “I like to box,” he said.

I’ve had this experience with reluctant writers again and again — when a topic clicks with a student, an essay can unfurl spontaneously. Of course the primary goal of a college essay is to help its author get an education that leads to a career. Changes in testing policies and financial aid have made applying to college more confusing than ever, but essays have remained basically the same. I would argue that they’re much more than an onerous task or rote exercise, and that unlike standardized tests they are infinitely variable and sometimes beautiful. College essays also provide an opportunity to learn precision, clarity and the process of working toward the truth through multiple revisions.

When a topic clicks with a student, an essay can unfurl spontaneously.

Even if writing doesn’t end up being fundamental to their future professions, students learn to choose language carefully and to be suspicious of the first words that come to mind. Especially now, as college students shoulder so much of the country’s ethical responsibility for war with their protest movement, essay writing teaches prospective students an increasingly urgent lesson: that choosing their own words over ready-made phrases is the only reliable way to ensure they’re thinking for themselves.

Teenagers are ideal writers for several reasons. They’re usually free of preconceptions about writing, and they tend not to use self-consciously ‘‘literary’’ language. They’re allergic to hypocrisy and are generally unfiltered: They overshare, ask personal questions and call you out for microaggressions as well as less egregious (but still mortifying) verbal errors, such as referring to weed as ‘‘pot.’’ Most important, they have yet to put down their best stories in a finished form.

I can imagine an essay taking a risk and distinguishing itself formally — a poem or a one-act play — but most kids use a more straightforward model: a hook followed by a narrative built around “small moments” that lead to a concluding lesson or aspiration for the future. I never get tired of working with students on these essays because each one is different, and the short, rigid form sometimes makes an emotional story even more powerful. Before I read Javier Zamora’s wrenching “Solito,” I worked with a student who had been transported by a coyote into the U.S. and was reunited with his mother in the parking lot of a big-box store. I don’t remember whether this essay focused on specific skills or coping mechanisms that he gained from his ordeal. I remember only the bliss of the parent-and-child reunion in that uninspiring setting. If I were making a case to an admissions officer, I would suggest that simply being able to convey that experience demonstrates the kind of resilience that any college should admire.

The essays that have stayed with me over the years don’t follow a pattern. There are some narratives on very predictable topics — living up to the expectations of immigrant parents, or suffering from depression in 2020 — that are moving because of the attention with which the student describes the experience. One girl determined to become an engineer while watching her father build furniture from scraps after work; a boy, grieving for his mother during lockdown, began taking pictures of the sky.

If, as Lorrie Moore said, “a short story is a love affair; a novel is a marriage,” what is a college essay? Every once in a while I sit down next to a student and start reading, and I have to suppress my excitement, because there on the Google Doc in front of me is a real writer’s voice. One of the first students I ever worked with wrote about falling in love with another girl in dance class, the absolute magic of watching her move and the terror in the conflict between her feelings and the instruction of her religious middle school. She made me think that college essays are less like love than limerence: one-sided, obsessive, idiosyncratic but profound, the first draft of the most personal story their writers will ever tell.

Nell Freudenberger’s novel “The Limits” was published by Knopf last month. She volunteers through the PEN America Writers in the Schools program.

NTRS - NASA Technical Reports Server

Available downloads, related records.

IMAGES

Essay
Earth Science
Biology Life on Earth Summaries
Different Aspects of Science in Your Daily Life Essay Example
Reflection Paper The Earth System
An Introduction to Life Science.docx

VIDEO

EARTH & LIFE SCIENCE PERFORMANCE TASK 2
10 Lines On Save Water Save Life/Essay On Save Water In English/Save Water 💧
Perpetuation of Life || Earth & Life Science || SHS Quarter 4 Week 3
The Evolving Concept of Life based on Emerging...... || Earth & Life Science || SHS Quarter 4 Week 1
Journey to 4 Billion Years Ago: Earth's History Unveiled
Earth and Life Sciences: Lesson 1: Introduction to Life Science (part 1)

COMMENTS

Essay on Earth And Life Science
Earth and Life Science is a fascinating field of study that helps us understand our world and the life forms that live in it. It is a combination of two major sciences. Earth Science studies the Earth, its structure, and how it changes over time. Life Science, on the other hand, focuses on living things, their functions, and their interactions ...
Make an essay about what uve learned in earth and life science
Earth and Life Science Reflection Essay In Earth and Life Science, I have learned a great deal about the natural world and the interconnectedness of various phenomena. Here are my. Continue reading. Ask a new question. Discover more from: Bs Architecture Cee100. University of the Philippines Visayas.
The origin of life on Earth, explained
The origin of life on Earth stands as one of the great mysteries of science. To find out if we are alone in the galaxy, we will need to better understand what geochemical conditions nurtured the first life forms. Several seminal experiments in this topic have been conducted at the University of Chicago, including the Miller-Urey experiment that suggested how the building blocks of life could ...
PDF Essays on Life Sciences,
of life on Earth (see for example Nutman et al., 2016). Figure I.1. The first fossil cell (a), found in stromatolites in western Australia (c), and dated c. 3.8 billion years ago. The reconstructed model (b) looks very much like a modern cyanobacterium. The question is: first there was no life on Earth, then Earth was teeming with life.
Earth sciences
Earth sciences, the fields of study concerned with the solid Earth, its waters, and the air that envelops it. Included are the geologic, hydrologic, and atmospheric sciences. The broad aim of the Earth sciences is to understand the present features and past evolution of Earth and to use this knowledge, where appropriate, for the benefit of humankind. . Thus, the basic concerns of the Earth ...
1.2 Why Study Earth?
The simple answer to this question is that Earth is our home — our only home for the foreseeable future — and in order to ensure that it continues to be a great place to live, we need to understand how it works. Another answer is that some of us can't help but study it because it's fascinating. But there is more to it than that:
1: Life and Earth
University of California, Davis. Earth is the only known inhabited planet, and the geological record demonstrates that life and Earth have co-evolved for billions of years in a closely linked system. Life is sustained by energy and material exchanges among Earth's interior, Earth's surface, and the Sun. In turn, life has changed the surface ...
Reflections On: Our Planet and Its Life, Origins, and Futures
The theme of the 175th Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), "Our Planet and Its Life, Origins, and Futures," celebrated an enormous breadth of scientific accomplishments that transcends many subdisciplines of the natural and social sciences. It was intended to be both a reflection on what has been learned and a look forward to what must yet be ...
5.1. How did life first emerge on Earth?
Using the tools of science, we have learned that Earth is about 4.5 billion years old. As old as Earth is, we've found evidence that tells us that living things have been around on Earth for almost as long as our planet has been here. We have evidence that tells us that life may have been on Earth as far back as about 4 billion years ago.
How would we know whether there is life on Earth? This bold ...
That's home. That's us.". That fragile gleaming pixel reshaped how humanity visualizes its place in the Cosmos. So, too, did using Galileo to look for life on Earth, says Kaltenegger ...
How to Write a Science Essay
Continue reading to find some tips to help you write a successful science essay. Science Essay Writing Tips. Once you have chosen a topic and looked at examples, it's time to start writing the science essay. Here are some key tips for a successful essay: Research thoroughly; Make sure you do extensive research before you begin writing your paper.
Hypotheses about the origins of life (article)
In this article, we'll examine scientific ideas about the origin of life on Earth. The when of life's origins (3.5 ‍ billion years ago or more) is well-supported by fossils and radiometric dating. But the how is much less understood. In comparison to the central dogma or the theory of evolution, hypotheses about life's origins are much more ...
Essays About Earth: 7 Essay Examples And Topic Ideas
7. My Earth, My Responsibility By Poonam Ghimire. "Earth is a beautiful living planet in the Universe and the common habitat of more than 7 billion human population and millions of species of biodiversity. Our Earth provides us with food, shelter, and most of our requirements.
What Earth Science Is and Reasons to Study It
Earth science concentrates on investigating how the planet works and why. This field delves into the many layers of the Earth and explains how those pieces fit together into a cohesive structure ...
What is life? (article)
Biologists have identified various traits common to all the living organisms we know of. Although nonliving things may show some of these characteristic traits, only living things show all of them. 1. Organization. Living things are highly organized, meaning they contain specialized, coordinated parts.
Earth Science Benefits Everyone
When we emphasize Earth science education, everyone benefits. Our lives and civilization depend upon how we understand and manage our planet—Earth processes affect us all. Weather patterns influence the availability of water resources and the potential for forest fires; Earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, hurricanes, and floods can kill large ...
Earth Science Essays: Examples, Topics, & Outlines
Earth Science. Ring of Fire. Ring of Fire originally aired on the National Geographic Channel in August, 2007 as part of the Naked Science series produced by Ben Fox and Ian Hunt. The hour-long Ring of Fire program focuses on scientific efforts to understand the danger posed by the 25,000-mile long chain of volcanoes and earthquakes that makes ...
Earth and Life Science: Senior High School SHS Teaching Guide
Earth and Life Science Teaching Guide. Earth Science is a Core Subject taken in the first semester of Grade 11. This learning area is designed to provide a general background for the understanding of the Earth on a planetary scale. It presents the history of the Earth through geologic time. It discusses the Earth's structure and composition ...
10 Things We've Learned About the Earth Since Last Earth Day
10. Our Earth isn't alone. Okay, this one might not technically be a discovery about Earth, but over the past year we have learned a tremendous amount about what our Earth isn't: the only ...
Essay on Earth for Students and Children
500 Words Essay On Earth. The earth is the planet that we live on and it is the fifth-largest planet. It is positioned in third place from the Sun. This essay on earth will help you learn all about it in detail. Our earth is the only planet that can sustain humans and other living species. The vital substances such as air, water, and land make ...
Why are Earth Sciences Important?
The Earth Sciences offer an integrated and interdisciplinary approach to understanding Earth and apply knowledge from biology, chemistry, physics, ecology and mathematics to tackle complex issues. As our human population approaches 8 billion people, and if we wish to maintain and improve the quality of life on this planet, then we are required ...
Why Study the Life Sciences?
Thoreau was a great naturalist, and he realized that the life sciences reveal the truth of our existence; the life sciences shine a light on our real identities, so that we discover our true reality. Through the life sciences, we have learned that we all part of the human family, sharing the same basic genetic material.
Did Earth's multicellular life depend on plate tectonics?
Dr. Gerya tells Universe Today, "That very special condition (>500 million years coexistence of continents, oceans, and plate tectonics) is needed on a planet with a primitive life in order to ...
what you've learned in earth and life science?
Life science and physical science are both included in the vast field of earth science. The study of living things and their interactions, including biology, anatomy, ecology, is the focus of life science. It is the study of the planet Earth and the nearby solar system celestial bodies. Our ability to find resources that support and improve our ...
What I've Learned From My Students' College Essays
May 14, 2024. Most high school seniors approach the college essay with dread. Either their upbringing hasn't supplied them with several hundred words of adversity, or worse, they're afraid ...
NTRS
Since the first Mars Sample Return (MSR)-related report published by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in 1974, a series of panels, reports, and white papers have recognized the importance of sample temperature in meeting mission goals and defined a sample maximum temperature (henceforth SMT) limit. The Mars Sample Handling and Requirements Panel (MSHARP, 1999) flatly stated that "[t]he ...