You might think of this site as an Earth sciences version of Wikipedia, with a bit more of a moderated and expert technical editing role to help assure the technical accuracy (even beyond that that Wikipedia's own sizeable army of strong adherents attributes to it.)

Get your feet wet here by familiarizing yourself first with who and what is behind this online initiative and their commitment to "articulating the whole truth about all subjects." You can do that by going to the "About Us" link on the home page. (Hint: The National Council for Science and the Environment (NCSE) and the the Department of Geography and Environment and the Center for Energy and Environmental Studies at Boston University provide editorial support.

The motive behind their effort? Here's how they describe it:

The motivation behind the Encyclopedia of Earth is simple. Go to Google^tm and type in climate change, pesticides, nuclear power, sustainable development, or any other important environmental issue. Doing so returns millions of results, some fraction of which are authoritative. The remainder is of poor or unknown quality.

This illustrates a stark reality of the Web: digital information on the environment is characterized by an abundance of "great piles of content" and a dearth of "piles of great content." In other words, there are many resources for environmental content, but there is no central repository of authoritative information that meets the needs of diverse user communities. Our goal is to make the Encyclopedia of Earth the largest reliable information resource on the environment in history.

Pretty lofty goals, huh? So judge for yourself. It's well worth a visit to the site, and you may find yourself returning often.