| c. 1800 BC | China | Chinese historical records refer to earthquakes. |
| c. 530 BC | Greece | Because it casts an arcuate shadow on the moon during eclipses, Pythagoras of Samos proposes that the Earth might be spherical. |
| 500 BC | Europe, Africa, Asia | Greek traveller and geographer Hecataeus of Miletus, writes Ges periodos/Tour Around the World, a description of the geography and ethnography of Europe, northern Africa, and Asia – the first book on geography. |
| 132 | China | Chinese engineer and philosopher Zhang Heng develops the first known seismometer/seismograph. |
| 1350 | England | The ‘Gough Map’, an early map of England, is drawn by an unknown cartographer. |
| 1457 | Venice, Portugal, world | The Venetian monk and cartographer Fra Mauro produces a new map of the world for Prince Henry the Navigator of Portugal, based on information from voyages the prince has sponsored. |
| 1492 | Germany | German navigator Martin Behaim, with painter Goerg Glockendon, constructs a terrestrial globe at Nuremberg, the earliest still in existence. |
| 1537 | Flanders | The Flemish cartographers Gemma Frisius and Gerardus Mercator collaborate to produce a celestial globe, complementary to their terrestrial globe of the previous year. |
| 1544 | Germany | German mineralogist Agricola (Georg Bauer) writes De ortu et causis subterraneis/On Subterranean Origin and Causes, a founding work in geology, identifying the erosive power of water, and the origin of mineral veins as depositions from solution. |
| 1546 | Flanders | Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator states that the Earth must have a magnetic pole separate from its ‘true’ pole, in order to explain the deviation of a compass needle from true North. |
| 1579 | England | English cartographer Christopher Saxton publishes his County Atlas of England and Wales, the first detailed regional atlas anywhere. |
| 1660 | Germany | The German scientist Otto von Guericke discovers the sudden drop in air pressure preceding a violent storm – a discovery that will revolutionize weather forecasting. He also suggests comets might return periodically, pre-empting Edmond Halley's work on this subject by 45 years. |
| 1714 | UK | An act of Parliament establishes a Board of Longitude in Britain, with the aim of finding a solution to the establishment of longitude at sea. A £20,000 prize is offered for an accurate method. |
| 1749 | France | French naturalist Georges-Louis de Buffon publishes the first book of his 36-volume Histoire naturelle, genérale et particulière/Natural History, General and Particular, the first attempt to bring together the various fields of natural history. |
| 1778 | France | In Epoques de la nature/Epochs of Nature, French scientist George-Louis Leclerc, Compte de Buffon, reconstructs geological history as a series of stages – the first to recognize such stages. It contradicts the doctrine that the Earth is only 6,000 years old. |
| 1788 | Scotland | Scottish geologist James Hutton's paper ‘Theory of the Earth’ expounds his uniformitarian theory of continual change in the Earth's geological features and marks a turning point in geology. |
| July 1830–April 1833 | Scotland | Scottish geologist Charles Lyell publishes the first volume of his three-volume work Principles of Geology in which he argues that geological formations are the result of presently observable processes acting over millions of years. It creates a new time frame for other sciences such as biology and palaeontology. |
| 1845–1958 | Germany | German naturalist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt lays the basis of modern geography with the publication of Kosmos/Cosmos, in which he arranges geographic knowledge in a systematic fashion. |
| 1861 | Germany | The first Archaeopteryx feather is found in upper Jurassic limestones of Solnhofen, Bavaria (now in Germany). Archaeopteryx has many reptilian features and is 55–190 million years old. It is still the oldest known bird. |
| 7 December 1872–26 May 1876 | UK | The British ship Challenger undertakes the world's first major oceanographic survey. Under the command of the Scottish naturalist Wyville Thomson, the crew collect marine animals and water samples, dredge and core samples of the ocean bottom, and make hundreds of temperature and depth measurements. |
| September 1904 | | In a lecture at St Louis, Missouri, French mathematician Jules-Henri Poincaré proposes a theory of relativity to explain Michelson and Morley's failed experiment to determine the velocity of the Earth. |
| 1912 | | The German geophysicist Alfred Wegener proposes that, 250 million years ago, a single land mass formed a supercontinent he calls ‘Pangea’. He argues that the supercontinent split into two components from which different portions broke free, forming the present continents which occupy their current positions through continental drift. |
| 15 January 1962 | UK | British weather reports start giving temperatures in centigrade as well as Fahrenheit. |
| 1965 | Canada | Canadian geologist John Tuzo Wilson publishes ‘A New Class of Faults and Their Bearing on Continental Drift’, in which he formulates the theory of plate tectonics to explain continental drift and seafloor spreading. |
| 1980 | world | A thin layer of iridium-rich clay, about 65 million years old, is found around the world. US physicist Luis Walter Alvarez suggests that it was caused by the impact of a large asteroid or comet which threw enough dust into the sky to obscure the Sun and cause the extinction of the dinosaurs. |
