This lesson plan aims to understand how Christopher Columbus made journeys across the Atlantic Ocean by examining wind patterns and data. Full description.

In this chapter, users explore relationships between air quality and population density using the image visualization tool, Google Earth. Humans discovered long ago that burning fossil fuels was a convenient way to get power. In engines for automobiles and plants that generate electricity, huge volumes of oil, gas, and coal are burned every day. Where many people live together in concentrated areas, ... Full description.

This chapter describes the technique of preparing latitude-longitude based data so that it can be imported into a geographic information system (GIS). It describes the steps to create a map to display data and guides users through some basic geographic analyses. The focus of the chapter?s case study is earthquake prediction. Users download and format near real-time and historical earthquake data from ... Full description.

In this activity, users examine satellite images from NASA's Total Ozone Mapping Spectrometer (TOMS) that show how much ozone is in the atmosphere over the Southern Hemisphere. They interpret the images to identify ozone thinning that develops over this region each summer, and compare its size from year to year. Using freely available image analysis software, ImageJ, users quantify the area of the ... Full description.