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Understanding Our Planet Through Chemistry

This U.S.Geological Survey site shows how chemists and geologists use analytical chemistry to: determine the age of the Earth; show that an extraterrestrial body collided with the Earth; predict volcanic eruptions; observe atmospheric change over millions of years; and document damage by acid rain and pollution of the Earth's surface..

Compiled by
Joseph E. Taggart, Jr.

You have three choices on how you can browse this site:

• The best choice to browse is the North American Version with inline snapshot size images and hypertext links to desktop (150k and up) .gif figures. This version downloads the index, which contains links to the two dozen chapters. You simply point and click to jump to the chapter in which you are interested. After that you will use a [ Previous | Contents | Next ] feature to move around the document. While this version can be accessed from any place in the World, the 40k inline images slow it down from outside North America.
• For our visitors from outside North America, (or anyone with a slow connection), we offer a World Wide Version . This version is identical to the North American Version, but to save download time, has only an snapshot size (40k) preview of each image, with hypertext links to both the snapshot size (40k) and desktop size (150k and up) .gif images. This way you get a fast preview of the image, and if you want to spend the download time, you can click on the link to either the snap shot image or the desktop image.
• Or you can download a 86k ascii version of the Text and Figure Captions Only (stripped of all html commands) for printing a paper copy on your machine.