A large blue-white iceberg looms over dark water near Ilulissat Icefjord, Greenland, with rocky hills and an overcast sky behind it.

Take your class somewhere they have never been.

Free, standards-aligned visual investigations for grades 9–12, built from an original archive of field photography and firsthand notes from seven continents.

Preview a free investigation See what is inside one

Ilulissat Icefjord, Greenland / 69.22°N 51.10°W

What is inside a Visual Field Investigation

Six parts / 15, 45 and 90 minute paths

A short narrated visual story

A place, introduced the way a field researcher would see it first, with no caption to lean on.

A curated photo set

The specific frames the investigation is built from, each with a caption, a credit and alt text.

Notice and wonder prompts

Students describe what they can see before anyone tells them what it is.

An image-as-evidence investigation

The photograph is treated as a primary source, read the way a historian reads a document.

A brief reading or data set

Enough real numbers to test a guess against, not a textbook chapter.

A claim, evidence and reasoning task

Students commit to a position and defend it with what they actually observed.

Free, and ready to teach.

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Geothermal systems

A tall white column of water and steam erupts from a low pale mound and rises through most of the frame against a deep blue sky, its top spreading into a broad billowing cloud that drifts to the right. Inside the column a narrower, denser jet of water is visible, textured and streaked. The mound at its base is bare gray and tan, streaked with runoff, carrying small patches of snow, with thin steam rising from vents to its right. Flat unbroken snow covers the foreground and the middle distance. A dark band of snow-dusted conifers runs along the right horizon, and a pale hazy ridge lies low on the left.

Where the Earth Leaks Heat

A stripe of orange running across white ground is a temperature map drawn by living things — and the place it was photographed sits on one of the largest geothermal resources on Earth, permanently off-limits to anyone who wants to generate electricity from it.

Grades 9–12 · 45 min

Surface water and erosion

A waterfall about two-thirds of the height of the frame drops down a rounded face of dark, wet rock and splits into two strands near the bottom. The wet rock is near-black and glistening; patches of bright green low plants grow on it and in the crevices beside it, in a band only a few centimeters wide at the water’s edge. To the left and right the rock is pale cream and gray, dry, and crossed by bare woody branches with few leaves. A still, dark pool fills the bottom quarter of the frame, its surface almost unbroken. Sunlight falls on the upper right; the lower left is in shadow.

What Water Leaves Behind

A waterfall is the easy part. The harder question is where the water came from, how long it has been working on this rock, and who else is counting on it.

Grades 9–12 · 45 min

Wind and deserts

A field of pale, near-white sand fills the whole frame, covered in fine parallel ripples a few centimeters apart running in gentle S-curves from the top of the frame to the bottom. Slightly below center sits a single clump of fine grass, its blades fanning out to the right in tan, olive and pale green, with seed heads. Faint curved arcs are scratched into the sand to the left of the clump. Just below it a low plant with gray-green oval leaves carries several clusters of small bright purple flowers, casting sharp shadows to the left. The light is low and comes from the right.

The Same Shape on Two Planets

Ripples in sand, a stone with one face cut flat, a dune field with a mountain range behind it, and the same forms photographed on Mars. One process, four scales, two planets.

Grades 9–12 · 45 min

Forty years of fieldwork, opened up for the classroom.

Almost every photograph, clip and field note in the Atlas was made by Greg Smith on his own expeditions, from the Colorado Plateau to the west coast of Greenland, and where one was not — a spacecraft image, say — the credit is shown beneath the frame. Each image carries a caption a student can cite, and its location where that has been confirmed.

We are auditing that archive now for rights, accuracy and cultural sensitivity, working through it one investigation at a time.

1,100+Catalogued frames

7Continents

A wide view. In the middle distance a broad pool of pale blue-green water steams heavily, with a low bank of white vapor drifting across it. In front of the pool the ground is covered in bands of orange, rust and brown microbial mat, cut by darker channels and shallow standing water that reflects the sky. Behind the pool a forested hill rises under blue sky with scattered cumulus cloud. — Grand Prismatic Spring, Midway Geyser Basin, Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming · Greg Smith

Live field trips are next.

We want to bring a live version of the field — a short guided look at the place in a photograph, then open questions — into a classroom in real time. Nothing is scheduled yet. Until it is, the fastest way to hear about it is to start with one of the investigations that are ready today.

See the investigations

It is free, and it stays free.

The core classroom library is free forever, funded by grants and sponsored collections. No login, no trial, no upsell in front of a lesson.

Reviewed before it reaches you.

Each module is meant to be read by a subject scientist and a practising teacher before it publishes, with a reviewer from the place itself where that matters. For the investigations live today, that review is in progress, not complete.

We are early, and we will say so.

The library is small on purpose. We would rather build it well with you than publish a hundred nobody teaches twice.

A small iceberg fragment floats on calm, deep blue water off Greenland, its submerged form visible as a pale reflection beneath the surface.

Teach an investigation this month, and tell us what broke.

We are looking for teachers to pilot one and send back honest notes. It takes one class period and a short form afterward.

Pilot an investigationChoose an investigation

There is no mailing list yet. The three-question form at the end of the lesson does ask for a work email, so we can reply to what you tell us — nothing on this site asks for one before a download.