An evidence-driven Earth science platform
Understand Earth.
Discover its potential.
How the planet’s interior behaves, how that drives plate tectonics, how mountains, oceans, earthquakes and volcanoes emerge from it, and how rocks and minerals record the whole thing. Every published fact traces to a cited source, and where scientific certainty ends, the record says so.
Built on structured science
Claims, not prose
The canonical record is a registry of typed scientific claims. Articles are written on top of it and cite the claims they rest on, statement by statement.
Evidence with locators
Every claim cites evidence — a specific section, figure or data field in a tiered, re-checked source. “Where does the source say that?” is machine-answerable.
Honest uncertainty
Measured, established, inferred, modelled, disputed, unknown. Each claim declares how it is known, and open questions are first-class records rather than silences.
Earth systems
Browse all 499 records →499 entities across 31 types, connected by typed relationships into one account of how the planet works.
Commodities
What is sought out of the ground, treated as geology. Which minerals carry it, which mineral systems concentrate it, and which real deposits it is documented in — and no prices, forecasts or rankings anywhere.
Known deposits
Real, named bodies of mineralisation that authoritative sources recognise as deposits — what they are, who says so, where they are and how well that is known. A record of what has been found, which is not a map of what exists.
Earth materials
Rocks and minerals are not a catalogue to be memorised. Each one is a record of the conditions that made it, and reading that record is what turns a specimen into evidence.
Earthquakes and volcanoes
Two of the most visible expressions of plate tectonics — and two of the most commonly misexplained. Nothing collides in an earthquake, and volcanoes do not all form the same way.
Elements and isotopes
An element is defined by one number. An isotope by a second. And the atomic weight of an element is not a single number at all — which turns out to be the most useful fact of the three.
Geochemistry
Why the Earth is not chemically uniform. Elements divide between coexisting phases according to how well they fit, and four and a half billion years of that dividing has produced reservoirs of sharply contrasting composition.
Geological time
The time scale has two vocabularies — one for rock, one for time — and its boundaries are defined by physical reference points, not by the numbers attached to them.
Geological provinces and tectonic context
Where geological environments are, how they came to be there, and how well anybody knows where their edges run. A curated and expanding corpus — not a map of Earth, and not a basis for locating anything.
How we know
Almost nothing in this corpus was observed directly. Each conclusion about the deep Earth is the end of a chain of reasoning that starts with an instrument at the surface — and the chain is recorded alongside the conclusion.
Inside Earth
The planet is layered twice over — once by what its layers are made of, once by how they behave — and almost none of it has ever been seen.
Mineral systems
How metals become concentrated: the source of the components, what mobilised and carried them, what focused the flow, what made them stop, and what happened to the result afterwards. Six systems, each drawn from a published deposit model, and nothing here is a target.
Minerals
A mineral is a naturally occurring, ordered, compositionally characteristic solid — and several of the most familiar mineral names are not minerals at all.
Plate tectonics
The unifying framework of the solid-Earth sciences: a rigid outer shell broken into moving pieces, creating crust in some places and destroying it in others, at rates that balance.
Surface processes
The interior builds topography; the surface takes it apart again. Weathering and erosion are distinct processes, and treating them as synonyms hides why sediment ends up sorted.
Reading
All 49 articles →earth materials
Atoms, elements and isotopes
Three numbers describe an atom, and geologists use all three for different purposes. Confusing them is the commonest error in writing about geochemistry — and one of them is not a single number at all.
tectonic context
Cratons, shields and platforms
A craton is stable continental lithosphere. A shield is the part of one you can see. They are not two things, and the difference matters more than the words suggest.
minerals
Crystal structure and substitution
A crystal is a set of sites of particular sizes and charges. Which ions can occupy them decides what the mineral is, how its composition varies, and — as it turns out — where elements go in the Earth.
how we know
Dating the Earth
Radiometric dating is precise, well understood, and does not measure what people usually think it measures. Understanding what it actually records explains why the age of the Earth had to come from meteorites.
inside earth
Earth’s internal heat
The engine that moves plates, builds mountains and melts rock runs on two fuels, not one: heat inherited from the planet’s formation, and heat still being made by radioactive decay. Separating the two took a particle detector.
geochemistry
Element partitioning
The reason the Earth is not chemically uniform is a matter of fit: whether a particular ion suits a particular site in a particular crystal, under particular conditions. Everything else follows from that.
Everything above rests on 121 registered sources, tiered by authority, with retrieval and re-verification dates on every record.