16: Hills are Weird
PLANETARY SCIENCE
Why do we still have hills, despite gravity and erosion? We'll talk about the powerful forces that shape the terrain and prevent the Earth from being completely flat.
The five lessons
Lesson 1
How did your local hill grow?
This is the seventy-sixth lesson of our Big Course. Along the way to the answer, you'll learn a new way to see a hill, a simple trick for getting un-lost in a strange city, and why all rivers aren't yet canyons.
Lesson 2
What's a waterfall?
This is the seventy-seventh lesson of our Big Course. Along the way to the answer, you'll learn how a waterfall can make itself, what the ground is, the different types of sedimentary rock, and why an 8-year-old Brandon NEVER could have found dinosaur bones in his yard.
Lesson 3
How could you prove that evolution is true?
This is the seventy-eighth lesson of our Big Course. Along the way to the answer, you'll learn a very different way to interpret the strata in your hill, how to speedrun scientific progress, and why a single rabbit bone could change all of science.
(This lesson goes into Karl Popper's idea of "falsification", which secretly runs modern science. If you're as much of a philosophy geek as I am, I hope you enjoy this!)
Lesson 4
Who was America's biggest litterer?
This is the seventy-ninth lesson of our Big Course. Along the way to the answer, you'll learn how to find fossils yourself, some very weird garbage around North America, and a land that time forgot.
Lesson 5
How long does it take to make a hill?
This is the eightieth lesson of our Big Course. Along the way to the answer, you'll learn who (finally) won the oldest fight in geology, a new kind of rock, what made the scablands, and what keeps stamping big circles in Canada.