The Exploring Earth site was designed to accompany Earth Science, a high school textbook authored by Spaulding and Namowitz and published by McDougal Littell. The Web site was developed by TERC, a non-profit educational research and development firm in collaboration with McDougal Littell Visualizations and investigations on the site were designed to build students' knowledge of Earth Science concepts described in the textbook, and to raise student awareness of Earth as a system of interconnected components and processes. Supported during its development by the National Science Foundation, one link is to the TERC website and another is to the publisher's site.