Environmental Science: The Geosphere

What are Earth's four systems?

5-ESS2-1 Develop a model using an example to describe ways the geosphere, biosphere, hydrosphere, and/or atmosphere interact.

​Earth can be divided into four systems called the atmosphere, biosphere, hydrosphere, and geosphere. These four systems interact with each other and make up the Earth.

On the next slide we will watch a small overview video explaining these four systems.

Open Ended

Can you name and give an example of each of the four systems?

​Earth's surface is the atmosphere, a mixture of gases that surrounds Earth. This mixture makes up the air that you breathe and that plants use to make food.

Labeling

Label the four different Earth systems in this image.

Drag labels to their correct position on the image

atmosphere

hydrosphere

geosphere

biosphere

​Often you can see the four systems at the same time, such as when you visit a beach. The air, crabs or fishes, ocean water, and sand are part of different systems. These four systems interact to affect weather, shape landforms, and support living things.

​Suppose you are on a shuttle to outer space. You pass through Earth's atmosphere made of air. As you move away from the surface, the air's pressure and temperature change.

​Air pressure is how much the air pushes on any surface. Air is made of tiny invisible pieces of matter. The closer together the pieces are, the higher the air pressure. The pieces are closest together near Earth's surface.

Open Ended

Why would the particles be closer together near Earth's surface?

​ As you move away from Earth, the pieces of matter in the atmosphere are more spread out. The amount of air decreases as you move up into the atmosphere.
Temperature decreases as you move farther from Earth's surface. But air does not stay cool. It changes in layers.

​As you move upward through the atmosphere, the temperature changes. But it does not change in a constant pattern. Instead, it cools, warms, cools again, warms again, and then cools again as you go higher. Scientists divide the atmosphere into different layers depending on how the temperature changes.

​The layer closest to Earth's surface is called the troposphere. You live in the warmest part of the troposphere. You live in the warmest part of the troposphere because the sun warms the Earth's surface, which then warms the air above it. As you move up in the troposphere, it grows colder.

​Eventually you reach a point where the temperature begins to increase as you get farther from Earth's surface. This is a new layer called the stratosphere. When the sunlight hits the air at the top of the stratosphere, it forms a new substance called ozone that absorbs energy from the sunlight and heats up the air at the top of this layer.

​There are several more layers above the stratosphere. There is another layer where the temperature decreases as you move away from the Earth. Above that is a layer where the temperature increases. The temperature decreases and increases in different layers until you reach outer space.

​Gases in the Atmosphere
Air is a mixture of gases. The amount of each gas changes slightly from place to place. Nitrogen and oxygen make up almost all of the air in the lower layers of the atmosphere. The rest is made up of other gases such as argon, carbon dioxide, hydrogen, and ozone.

​Many of the gases in the atmosphere are important to organisms in the biosphere. Plants use carbon dioxide as a building block to make food. Animals use oxygen to release energy from their food. Carbon dioxide also absorbs energy and warms the atmosphere.

​The Atmosphere Heats Earth
Space is too cold for organisms to live in, but Earth is warm. How does life exist on Earth? Energy carried by light is absorbed by the Earth's surface. Earth then emits, or sends, energy outward. Most of that energy gets absorbed by gases in the atmosphere such as carbon dioxide. The atmosphere then emits some of that energy out into space. It also emits some of it toward the ground, making Earth's surface even warmer. This is called the greenhouse effect.

​Life can exist on Earth because the greenhouse effect warms the surface. But too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere causes global warming, the overheating of the atmosphere.