HIN K LIK T E A S CIEN T IST WHAT IS OUT THERE TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 5 CHAPTERS IN THE BEgINNINg 7 WATER WORLD 17 SCIENTISTS IN ACTION 27 FUTURE EARTH 37 GLO SSARy 46 SELECTED bIbLIOGRAPHy 47 WEbSITES 47 INDEx 48 SCIENTIST IN THE SPOTLIGHT JAMES HUTTON 10 ALfRED WEGENER 20 MARy ANNING 30 EDWIN HUbbLE 40 3
HIN K LIK HIN K LIK T T E E A A S S T CIEN T IST CIEN T IS WHAT IS OUT THERE INTRODUCTION Charles Wyville Thomson watched as sailors attached weights to the end of a rope With a splash the rope hit the water beside the HMS Challenger A former British wooden warship the Challenger was now voyaging around the world on a scientific expedition supervised by the Scottish naturalist Thomson The Challenger was making a sounding mea suring with a weighted line to determine the ocean’s depth at latitude 11 24 north longitude 143 16 east a location southwest of the Mariana Islands At first Thomson and his crew did not believe what they were seeing their measurements were show ing a depth of more than five miles 8 km Another sounding returned the same result What they discovered would later be con firmed as the deepest point on Earth 56 years after Thomson’s voyage Challenger II measured a depth of nearly 6 8 miles 10 9 km at the spot that became known as the Challenger Deep Earth and space science is the study of our home planet and the celestial bodies around it Earth scientists study the oceans oceanographers the land geologists and the atmosphere meteorologists Space scientists such as astronomers and astrophysicists study planets moons stars and other topics related to outer space Both earth and space scientists rely on other sciences including physics chemis try and biology to provide a basis for their studies Using the scientific method they look at how Earth and space operate and come up with theories and ways to test them Their experiments lead to explana tions as to how the earth and the universe got here in the first place 5 5
