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
HIN K LIK T E A S CIEN T IST WHAT IS OUT THERE CHAPTER 1 IN THE BEgINNINg Geology iS THe STudy of THe earTH’S rockS and shaped and developed over time and includes formations it involves how the land has been the things such as rocks that are composed of one or more minerals The ancient greeks wrote about minerals and started to classify them by their hardness not until the 1600s did people become more interested in geology though at that time a debate was raging among religious people over how to prove that the biblical great flood occurred With more people digging for clues and exploring the different layers of the earth it led to the discovery of fossils unlike any living crea tures The field of paleontology was born in the 1700s as people began studying prehistoric life The more people dug into the earth the more useful things they found Mining for energy sources and semi precious metals made people rich and also provided Fossils help scientists under stand ancient creatures such as the birdlike Oviraptor resources such as coal and oil during the 1800s national governments began 7
