Isotoon explains earth and environmental science by showing the whole system moving. Ask about plate tectonics, the carbon cycle, weather or climate and get a short animated video, or a 3D model of how one part drives another.
Earth systems are big, slow and connected, which makes them hard to see all at once. Ask how one part drives another and watch the whole system move.
Earth's rigid outer shell, the lithosphere, is broken into plates that ride on the hotter, slowly flowing asthenosphere beneath them. The plates move a few centimeters a year, pulled by dense ocean plate sinking at subduction zones and pushed away from mid-ocean ridges, above a convecting mantle. Where plates pull apart new crust forms, where they collide one sinks or mountains rise, and where they slide past each other earthquakes follow.
Sunlight, mostly visible light, passes through the atmosphere and warms the surface. The warm surface gives off infrared radiation. Greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, water vapor and methane absorb that infrared and give it off again in every direction, some of it back toward the ground. More of these gases keeps more energy near the surface, so the surface warms until the energy leaving balances the energy arriving again.
Carbon moves between the atmosphere, the oceans, living things, soil and rock. Plants take in carbon dioxide by photosynthesis, and respiration, decay and fire return it to the air. The oceans absorb a large share of the carbon dioxide people emit, which makes seawater more acidic. Burning fossil fuels moves carbon that was stored in rock for millions of years into the air within decades, faster than these natural sinks take it back.
The ones marked 3D become a model you can turn, step through and tap.
Every claim is checked before anything is drawn, and every video lists its sources. See plans