This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Earth Science is the study of the planet's solid ground, waters, ice and atmosphere as one interacting system, its method the observation and physical analysis of the earth's materials, structures and processes. The field was drawn together as a single coordinated discipline during the International Geophysical Year of 1957 and 1958, when scientists across what had been separate geological, oceanic and atmospheric sciences coordinated their observations under one program for the first time.
For an atlas of religion and belief, earth science's geological branch, already named elsewhere in this collection, dates the physical settings behind several traditions' sacred landscapes, and the wider field's coordinated view of ground, water, ice and atmosphere lets a sacred mountain, spring, cave or coastline be read as a physical system with its own dated history. A tradition's account of a landscape's origin, a flood, an eruption, a spring that never runs dry, can be checked against what earth science's own physical record shows.
That check is why the field matters here specifically. A sacred landscape is a real physical place before it is anything else, and earth science is the discipline equipped to say how that place actually formed and how it has changed, alongside whatever the tradition itself says about it.