Every idea in this book lives somewhere real. Drag to move, scroll or pinch to zoom, and open a numbered pin to see why that spot matters, with links into the chapters. 44 places so far.
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Numbered pin: a place in this bookCircle: this week's quake, sized by magnitudePill: live weather stationAmber: 2011 Tōhoku replay
Base image: NASA Blue Marble (public domain). Pin positions are approximate. Live layers use the USGS and the National Weather Service. The dashed lines are the equator, the tropics and the polar circles.
The same pins as a reading list, grouped by unit.
The International Bureau of Weights and Measures keeps the world's measurement system in agreement. The platinum cylinder stored here defined the kilogram until 2019, when the unit was redefined using constants of nature.
A monument marks where the equator crosses Ecuador, at 0° latitude. Here days and nights stay close to 12 hours all year, and Polaris sits on the horizon.
Home of the Panthers, at about 41° N. Stand outside on a clear night and Polaris sits about 41° above the northern horizon, because Polaris altitude equals your latitude.
The 0° longitude line runs through this observatory near London. Every longitude on Earth is measured east or west from here, and each hour of sun-time difference equals 15° of longitude.
The deepest known spot in the ocean, nearly 11,000 meters down. It sits in a trench where the fast-moving Pacific Plate subducts beneath the Mariana Plate.
The Hawaiian islands sit above a mantle hot spot. Runny, low-silica basalt builds broad shield volcanoes, and the island chain ages toward the northwest, recording the Pacific Plate's motion.
Earth's highest peak, 8,849 meters, raised by the slow collision of India with Eurasia. The summit rock is marine limestone: this mountaintop was once a sea floor.
This Cascade composite volcano exploded on May 18, 1980, after thick, gas-charged magma sealed itself under pressure. It is the textbook example of an explosive, subduction-fed eruption.
Tambora's 1815 eruption was the largest in recorded history. Its ash and gas dimmed sunlight worldwide, and 1816 became the year without a summer, with June snow in New England.
This composite volcano buried the Roman cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum in ash in 79 AD. It is fed by subduction and still watched closely, with the city of Naples at its feet.
The Pacific Plate slides past the North American Plate along this famous transform fault. The plates grind, stick, and lurch, which is why California lives with earthquakes.
Iceland is one of the few places where the Mid-Atlantic Ridge rises above the sea. Here the North American and Eurasian plates pull apart a few centimeters per year, and you can walk in the rift between them.
In March 2011, the sea floor east of Japan lurched in a magnitude 9.0 subduction-zone earthquake, one of the largest ever recorded. The quake and the tsunami it launched reshaped how the world prepares for both.
The 1960 Valdivia earthquake reached magnitude 9.5, the largest ever measured. Its tsunami crossed the entire Pacific, reaching Hawaii and Japan.
A hot spot burning beneath the North American continent powers Yellowstone's geysers and hot springs. The park sits inside a caldera left by an enormous ancient eruption.
About 60 million years ago, thick basalt lava cooled slowly here and cracked into tens of thousands of hexagonal columns. It is extrusive igneous rock showing off its geometry.
Not diamonds at all, but quartz crystals with natural points on both ends, found in cavities in ancient dolostone. They are a New York mineral-collecting classic.
The dark cliffs across the Hudson from Westchester are the edge of a thick sheet of intrusive igneous rock. Magma squeezed between sedimentary layers as Pangaea began to rip apart.
These chalk cliffs are soft limestone built from the shells of microscopic sea life that rained onto a Cretaceous sea floor. They are an organic sedimentary rock you can see from France.
Eleven long, narrow lakes fill valleys that ice sheets deepened and dammed. Their parallel north-south shapes are the fingerprints of flowing ice.
Long Island's spine is a pair of terminal moraines dumped by the last ice sheet, with a sandy outwash plain to the south. The whole island is a glacial deposit.
Where the Mississippi meets the Gulf, the water slows and drops its sediment load, building land outward. Slowing water deposits the largest particles first, sorting as it goes.
The falls pour over a hard dolostone cap above softer layers. Undercutting has walked the falls about 11 kilometers upstream since the last ice age.
A circular dome of highlands exposing New York's oldest rocks, metamorphic gneiss about a billion years old. Also the site of a success story: lakes acidified by acid rain have been recovering since emissions rules took hold.
The Catskills look like mountains but sit on flat-lying, undistorted sedimentary bedrock. High elevation plus horizontal strata makes them a plateau, a favorite exam trap.
High in the Canadian Rockies, these shale layers preserve soft-bodied sea creatures from about 508 million years ago. They give science its clearest window on early animal life.
The Colorado River has cut through a stack of nearly two billion years of rock. Oldest layers at the bottom, youngest at the top, with unconformities marking missing chapters.
In 1788 James Hutton saw tilted rock layers buried under flat-lying ones here and understood the immensity of geologic time. It is the most famous unconformity in science.
Storm tracks converge on this modest peak, giving it famously violent conditions. In 1934 its observatory measured a 231 mile per hour wind, long the fastest ever recorded at a staffed station.
Cold, dry air from Canada meets warm, humid Gulf air over the plains, breeding strong fronts, thunderstorms, and more tornadoes than anywhere else on Earth.
Moist air rising along the equator feeds daily rain and the largest rainforest on Earth. It is the rainy half of the same circulation that dries the Sahara.
The driest non-polar place on Earth. The Andes block moist air from the east, a cold offshore current starves storms from the west, and some spots go years without rain.
This warm current carries tropical Atlantic heat north past our coast and on toward Europe. It is a big reason northwestern Europe stays far milder than its latitude suggests.
A dormant volcano just south of the equator, high enough that ice survives near its 5,895 meter summit. Elevation cools climate about as powerfully as latitude does.
The world's largest hot desert sits near 30° N, where the planet's circulation sinks dry air. Notice how it lines up with the Tropic of Cancer on this map.
Rising just east of Lake Ontario, Tug Hill catches the full force of lake-effect storms. It is one of the snowiest places in the eastern United States, often topping 20 feet in a winter.
The shape of this bay funnels and amplifies the twice-daily tides to the largest range on Earth, up to about 16 meters. The moon's gravity does the daily work.
Buried under the Yucatán is the crater of the asteroid strike 66 million years ago that ended the Mesozoic Era. Its layer of debris marks the boundary in rocks worldwide.
Rockets here launch toward the east to borrow Earth's rotation, which already carries the pad along at about 1,500 kilometers per hour. Lower latitude means a bigger free boost.
At 4,200 meters, above much of the atmosphere's water vapor, some of Earth's largest telescopes read light from across the electromagnetic spectrum.
About 50,000 years ago an iron asteroid fragment blasted this bowl, 1.2 kilometers across. It is the best-preserved impact crater on Earth.
The largest structure built by living things, visible from orbit. Warming ocean water stresses its corals, making the reef a sensitive gauge of climate change.
Since 1958, instruments here have measured atmospheric carbon dioxide climbing year after year. This record, the Keeling curve, is the backbone of modern climate evidence.
Ice cores drilled here preserve bubbles of ancient atmosphere. They let scientists compare carbon dioxide and temperature across hundreds of thousands of years.