As the nation's trusted source of geoscience data and insights, Geoscience Australia is proud to champion Earth Science Week – a global celebration that highlights how Earth science shapes our everyday lives.
This year's theme, Critical Minerals for a Thriving Society, spotlights the minerals behind the technology we use every day – from smartphones and solar panels to electric vehicles and renewable energy. These minerals are essential to Australia's prosperity and the transition to a sustainable future, and Geoscience Australia plays a central role in finding and understanding them.
Earth science is beneath our feet. The Earth sciences that focus on what’s below our feet include fields such as geology, geophysics, geochemistry, and palaeontology. These fields examine rocks, landscapes, and resources to allow us to see how the planet's systems work, how they evolved over time, and how humans interact with them. Basically, all research and investigations that observes, explores, or explains Earth's composition and evolution falls under Earth sciences.
We live in an amazing world with phones, computers, advanced medicine, and electric cars. To create this modern technology, we rely on a wide variety of elements (like aluminium) and minerals (such as bauxite) that come from rocks in the Earth.
Elements like lithium, cobalt, and rare earths are vital for clean energy technologies—like solar panels, wind turbines, and batteries. We identify these minerals and elements as Critical Minerals and Strategic Materials, due to their importance and the risk that their supply chains could become disrupted. Without them we would not be able to enjoy any of these advanced technologies that we use in our daily lives.
Geoscience Australia provides resources to help us celebrate Earth Science Week, including lesson plans for teachers.
The library I work in caters for three to eight year olds, their teachers and their parents and while I might not be looking for books on critical minerals, I am constantly asked for books about rocks, gems, fossils, volcanoes and caves.
Recently I bought Stalactite & Stalagmite by Drew Beckmeyer, sight unseen because it was a Caldecott Honor Book and on a topic my students are fascinated by. It was too expensive, but I trusted the reviews. I do like the art and the talking rock formations and animals, but I am often confused about who is talking as there are no speech bubbles. I thought the speech text was coded, mustard yellow for the trilobite, red for the triceratops, capital letters for the giant ground sloth, upside-down brown text for the bat, and pink and blue text for the stalactite and stalagmite, but it is inconsistent when they are speaking. I'm sure my students won't be fazed. I love the very small white timeline along the bottom of the pages and the information at the back about the creatures and features written about in the story. This is a book that spans a wide-age readership because of all the unusual features and the myriad of ways it could be read.
Books about caves are not easy to find for this age group. Here's some easy nonfiction:
Here's some that also provide a historic view of caves:
The library has these books about volcanoes. The first two are always on loan. My students love the oversized books by Claire Saxby and Jess Rackleft.
