By the Editorial Team Editorial review: checked against the NYSED 2024 Earth & Space Sciences Reference Tables PDF, the NYSED 2011 Physical Setting/Earth Science Reference Tables PDF, and the NYSED Regents archive on July 25, 2026.
If you are preparing for a New York Regents exam, the earth science reference tables are not just a booklet you bring to the test. They are part of how the test is meant to be taken.
Students often treat the tables like a giant fact sheet to memorize. That is usually the wrong approach. A better approach is to learn what kinds of information live in the booklet, how to find them fast, and which edition matches your actual course. Once that clicks, the tables stop feeling like a pile of pages and start functioning like built-in support.
In New York classrooms, these tables show up in labs, quizzes, homework, review packets, and Regents prep because they collect the constants, maps, charts, equations, identification tools, and state-specific geology facts students are expected to use. One question may send you to radioactive dating. Another may depend on weather data. Another may turn on New York geologic history.
The biggest source of confusion right now is the transition from the legacy 2011 ESRT to the newer 2024 ESSRT. Some students still need the older Physical Setting/Earth Science Reference Tables. Others in the newer Earth and Space Sciences pathway need the updated booklet. During that overlap, the first step is simple: verify your version with your teacher before you print, study, or practice.
What Are Earth Science Reference Tables?
The Earth Science Reference Tables are the open-book support document used in New York Earth Science instruction and Regents testing. A widely used New York teacher guide describes the ESRT as a booklet containing important measurements, equations, maps, and identification tables that is used in classes, tests, labs, and the Regents exam itself (NewYorkScienceTeacher ESRT guidance).
That matters because the booklet is not just background material. It is part of the problem-solving process. Students use it to identify minerals and rocks, read atmosphere and weather information, compare solar system data, interpret Earth-process diagrams, and connect fossils or events to New York geologic history. In other words, the exam often rewards accurate reading and navigation more than pure memorization.
Most students in the transition period will encounter one of two versions:
- the legacy 2011 ESRT for Physical Setting/Earth Science
- the newer 2024 ESSRT for Earth & Space Sciences
The 2024 booklet says it should be used beginning in the 2024–25 school year and that the first Regents Examination in Earth and Space Sciences using it is June 2025 (NYSED 2024 ESSRT). During the same period, the older ESRT remains in use for some students, so version-checking is essential.
As a study rule, focus less on memorizing every number and more on recognizing table categories. Common high-value topics across the booklets include:
- solar system data
- radiometric dating
- rock and mineral identification
- New York geologic history
- weather variables
- Earth system patterns
One state-linked prep page says ESRT use accounts for approximately 35% of exam questions, while a third-party Regents strategy guide argues the booklet can answer roughly half of the multiple-choice questions; the safest way to read those figures is as rough prep estimates, not a guaranteed official percentage, because they measure usage differently (NYS Migrant ESRT page; OpenExamPrep ESRT guide).
A practical test-day mindset is this: if you can answer “What page would I use?” before you answer the question itself, you are using the tables the right way.
Which Version Applies to You: ESRT 2011 vs ESSRT 2024?
The short answer is course-based, not statewide-all-at-once.
According to the NewYorkScienceTeacher reference-table guidance, starting in the 2024–2025 school year, some students use the new ESSRT for the NGSS-aligned Earth and Space Science course, while some still use the older ESRT. The same guidance says the 2011 ESRT has the same content as the 2010 edition except that the ruler on the cover was removed, and it notes that standard hard copies are no longer routinely supplied because schools are expected to print from the online files. It also states that only Braille and large-type editions are supplied directly through State Education and warns that archived older editions are not for current classroom use (NewYorkScienceTeacher ESRT guidance).
That gives you a clear decision path:
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Check the course name on your schedule. If your class is the newer Earth and Space Sciences course, the 2024 ESSRT is more likely.
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Check the exam you are actually taking. During the transition, the course-exam combination matters more than whatever people casually call the class.
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Check the booklet your teacher uses for classwork. That is the version you should practice with every week.
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Do not train with random archive PDFs unless your teacher specifically assigns them. Older editions may be real, but they belong to past testing periods.
The comparison that matters most for students is practical, not historical.
Quick decision guide
- Use the 2024 ESSRT if your school has transitioned you into the newer Earth & Space Sciences pathway.
- Use the 2011 ESRT if you are still in the legacy Physical Setting/Earth Science pathway.
- Ask before printing if you are unsure. A wrong edition means wrong page locations, different layouts, and different habits under pressure.
There are also content-level differences. The teacher guidance above also points readers to the NYSED ESSRT revision log, which is useful because the newer booklet has been updated as issues are identified.
Finally, be explicit with yourself about archived material: the NYSED Regents archive labels old Earth Science reference tables by exam period, such as 2010 for exams from January 2010 to August 2011, 2001 for exams from January 2001 to August 2009, and 1994 for exams before January 2001. Those are archive documents, not default prep tools for current students (NYSED Regents archive).
Official Download Links for All Editions
If your goal is simply to get the right booklet fast, start with the official files first and use state-linked collections for translations and convenience.
- 2024 Earth & Space Sciences Reference Tables, English, official NYSED PDF: NYSED 2024 ESSRT PDF
- 2011 Physical Setting/Earth Science Reference Tables, English, official NYSED PDF: NYSED 2011 ESRT PDF
- Archived 2010, 2001, and 1994 editions, plus older translated editions and exam-period notes: NYSED Regents archived science reference tables
For language access and classroom support materials, use the New York State Migrant Education Program’s Earth Science reference-table page. It provides the 2011 ESRT in English and Spanish, the 2024 Earth & Space Sciences tables in English, and points users to NYSED’s translated 2024 materials; it also notes that the Spanish 2024 edition was updated in March 2025 (NYS Migrant ESRT page).
A few download rules will save you time:
- Lead with NYSED-hosted PDFs when you want the most authoritative file.
- Use state-linked collections for translations, worksheets, and convenience access.
- Treat third-party mirrors as convenience copies, not as the authority.
- Print at full size when scale, layout, or page spacing matters.
- Label every copy by year and course name if you keep more than one edition in a folder.
That last step matters more than people think. “Earth Science reference tables” is a generic phrase. 2011 ESRT and 2024 ESSRT are not interchangeable study documents.
2024 ESSRT Table of Contents and Key Data
The 2024 Earth & Space Sciences Reference Tables is a noticeably different-feeling booklet from the older ESRT. Its table of contents lists 20 tables/models, including solar system data, generalized nucleosynthesis in a massive star, part of the electromagnetic spectrum, emission spectra of elements from stars, the H-R diagram, life cycles of stars, New York geologic history, New York bedrock geology, energy and mineral resources, landscape regions, Earth’s interior, global tectonic activity, Bowen’s Reaction Series, igneous-rock composition, the rock cycle, radioactive elements used for radiometric dating, mineral identification, weather symbols, planetary wind belts, lower-atmosphere structure, and surface ocean currents. The booklet also states that it should be used beginning in the 2024–25 school year and that the first Regents exam using it is June 2025 (NYSED 2024 ESSRT PDF).
The ESSRT makes it much easier to see, at a glance, that Earth and Space Sciences is not just “old Earth Science plus a few edits.” The star-content pages are central, not tucked away as background.
The solar system table alone gives you a good sense of the booklet’s detail. For Earth, it lists a mean distance from the Sun of 149.6 million km, a revolution period of 365.26 days, an equatorial diameter of 12,756 km, and an axial tilt of 23.49° (NYSED 2024 ESSRT). Those are the exact kinds of facts students do not need to memorize if they know where to turn.
The New York pages remain important too. The booklet includes Eurypterus remipes as the New York State Fossil, and the geologic-history pages include events such as the Grenville orogeny, Taconic orogeny, Acadian orogeny, Alleghenian orogeny, and the breakup of Pangaea (NYSED 2024 ESSRT).
A few other details are worth noticing before you ever sit for an exam:
- the Earth-interior model is explicitly marked not drawn to scale
- the weather, wind, atmosphere, and ocean-current pages are still there
- radiometric dating remains a standard lookup tool
- mineral and rock process pages still matter, even with the added astronomy content
So what is the student takeaway? The 2024 booklet is not “harder” because it is newer. It is simply different in organization and emphasis. If your course uses it, your prep should use it every single week. Under time pressure, familiarity with page layout matters almost as much as content knowledge.
Legacy 2011 ESRT Highlights and Recurring Data
The legacy 2011 ESRT still drives many classic Regents study habits because so many recurring question types were built around it.
One of the most tested pages is the radioactive-isotope table. In the 2011 booklet, Carbon-14 → Nitrogen-14 has a half-life of 5.7 × 10³ years, Potassium-40 has 1.3 × 10⁹ years, Uranium-238 → Lead-206 has 4.5 × 10⁹ years, and Rubidium-87 → Strontium-87 has 4.9 × 10¹⁰ years (NYSED 2011 ESRT PDF).
Another high-value page is the specific-heats-and-water-properties material. The 2011 ESRT lists the specific heat of liquid water as 4.18 J/g·°C, solid water as 2.11 J/g·°C, water vapor as 2.00 J/g·°C, dry air as 1.01 J/g·°C, basalt as 0.84 J/g·°C, granite as 0.79 J/g·°C, iron as 0.45 J/g·°C, copper as 0.38 J/g·°C, and lead as 0.13 J/g·°C. It also gives water’s heat of fusion as 334 J/g, heat of vaporization as 2260 J/g, and density as 1.0 g/mL at 3.98°C (NYSED 2011 ESRT).
The equations page is another repeat performer. The legacy booklet gives students formulas such as:
- eccentricity = distance between foci / length of major axis
- density = mass / volume
- gradient = change in field value / distance
Those formulas matter because the exam often frames them through word problems rather than asking you to recite them. A question about orbit shape becomes an eccentricity lookup. A map question becomes a gradient problem. A mass-and-volume prompt becomes density.
Why do these pages come up so often?
Because they connect directly to standard Regents tasks:
- matching an isotope to a dating situation
- spotting that liquid water resists temperature change more than common rocks or metals
- computing orbital eccentricity
- finding a gradient between two values over distance
- using weather tables and earthquake travel-time tools elsewhere in the booklet
The real skill is not “know every number cold.” The real skill is “recognize the trigger words that tell you where to turn.”
For example:
- organic remains often signals Carbon-14
- dry-bulb and wet-bulb signals weather tables
- S-wave and P-wave arrival times signals the earthquake travel-time graph
- texture plus mineral composition signals rock identification
If you are still on the legacy pathway, drill those page associations until they feel automatic. That is the fastest way to make the booklet work for you instead of slowing you down.
New York-Specific Geology Tables
One reason New York’s earth science reference tables feel different from generic formula sheets is how much New York State geology they include.
These pages are where the course becomes local. Students are not only asked about global Earth processes. They are also expected to connect bedrock, fossils, mountain-building events, landscape regions, and maps to places inside the state. That is why names such as the Adirondack Mountains, Catskills, Allegheny Plateau, Hudson-Mohawk Lowlands, and St. Lawrence Lowlands keep showing up in review materials and classwork (NYSED 2024 ESSRT; NYSED 2011 ESRT).
The state geology pages usually ask you to do one of four things.
1. Match a fossil or event to time
This is where students work with New York geologic history. The official tables include Eurypterus remipes as the state fossil and show major events such as the Grenville and Taconic orogenies (NYSED 2024 ESSRT). If a question asks which event came first, or which fossil belongs to which broad interval, the chart matters more than memory.
2. Read a landscape-region map
Questions on landscape regions often test whether you can locate a region correctly and connect it to topography, bedrock, or broader geologic history. Students lose points here when they stare at answer choices instead of actually reading the map.
3. Use bedrock or resource maps
Both the older and newer table sets include state-focused geology pages beyond a simple timeline. Those pages support questions about where rock units, geologic structures, or resource patterns belong in New York State.
4. Link local geology to larger Earth processes
These questions turn local places into process questions: mountain building, sediment deposition, metamorphism, glaciation, erosion, or tectonic history.
A good study habit is to stop treating these pages like “the map section” and start treating them as high-yield evidence pages. They often answer the question more directly than a student’s memory will.
Also be careful with OCR copies and low-quality scans. Geologic-history charts, bedrock maps, and cross-sections are exactly the kinds of materials that break down in unofficial text conversions. If a label looks fuzzy, strange, or obviously misspelled, compare it against a clean PDF before trusting it. That warning matters especially for state-specific names and timelines, where one bad scan can train the wrong habit.
Regents Exam Strategies: Navigate Tables Like a Pro
The fastest score improvement for most students comes from a mindset shift: stop asking “Do I remember this?” and start asking “Where would the tables show me this?”
That sounds minor, but it changes how you read the exam.
A useful rule from common Regents prep guidance is to follow a three-step routine: identify what quantity or relationship the question wants, turn to the matching page, and extract the value or pattern from the booklet. The same strategy guidance highlights recurring table-based tasks such as eccentricity, S–P lag, dew point and relative humidity, and liquid water’s unusually high specific heat (OpenExamPrep ESRT guide).
Here is a reliable workflow.
1. Find the noun before the number
Many students get distracted by the calculation and miss the category signal.
- organic material → radioactive dating
- dry-bulb / wet-bulb → weather tables
- P-wave / S-wave → earthquake travel-time graph
- mineral composition / texture → rock charts
- axial tilt / revolution period → solar system data table
Before solving, decide what type of table the question belongs to.
2. Turn first, solve second
A common mistake is trying to reason from memory and only checking the booklet afterward. Reverse that sequence. The tables frequently narrow four answer choices to one almost immediately.
3. Practice micro-lookups, not just full tests
Full-length exams matter, but short drills often build table fluency faster. Good micro-lookup prompts include:
- Which isotope is used for organic remains?
- Which material has the highest listed specific heat?
- What does the S–P time gap help you determine?
- Where do you find Earth’s axial tilt?
- Which New York chart shows fossils and orogenies together?
- Which page would you use for dry-bulb and wet-bulb data?
Those drills are small, but they build automaticity.
4. Watch for edition traps
A strategy that works on the legacy ESRT may send you to the wrong page in the ESSRT. During the transition, students should practice only with the booklet they will actually use on assessments.
5. Use clean PDFs for practice
If you study from blurry screenshots, cropped packets, or text-only transcriptions, you are adding avoidable difficulty. The official PDFs and state-linked copies preserve layout, symbols, and spacing better than random reposts do.
For extra structured practice, the NYS Migrant page offers ESRT review materials including an 82-question review guide and a 145-question review worksheet on 8 pages with answer key, which can be useful for building lookup speed (NYS Migrant ESRT page).
The highest-scoring students usually are not the ones who memorized the most isolated facts. They are the ones who can locate the right chart faster, read it more carefully, and avoid solving the wrong problem.
Printing, Accessibility, and Interactive Study Tools
For most students, printing is simple: download the exact PDF your course uses, print it clearly, and keep one dedicated copy for homework and timed practice. That matters because exam confidence comes partly from visual familiarity.
For schools, the logistics are specific. The NewYorkScienceTeacher guidance says standard high school science reference tables are no longer routinely supplied in hard copy and that schools are expected to print enough copies from the online versions. It also says that Braille and large-type editions only can be requested from State Education, and schools should be ready with the subject, quantity, name, school address, and BEDS code when requesting them (NewYorkScienceTeacher ESRT guidance).
Translations matter too. The NYSED Regents archive provides older translated editions tied to specific testing periods, especially the 2010 and 2001 Earth Science reference tables. The archive also warns that the ruler on page one of the 2010 translated editions may not print exactly to scale depending on printer settings, so full-size printing and careful margins are important (NYSED Regents archived science reference tables).
As for study tools, paper remains the best default because it matches actual classroom and exam use. But some students and teachers like a second study mode for organizing self-made data. The TablePage homepage describes a spreadsheet-to-page tool, and its free online XLSX viewer says it supports CSV, TSV, XLSX, and XLS, offers sort/filter/search, auto-generated charts, AI-generated insights, and free no-signup uploads up to 50 MB. That can be useful for organizing your own isotope lists, practice logs, mineral notes, or custom review tables.
The important distinction is this: TablePage is separate from NYSED’s official materials. It can help you organize study data, but it does not replace the official ESRT or ESSRT booklet.
Used well, that gives you two different study modes:
- official PDF mode for realistic Regents navigation
- interactive spreadsheet mode for sorting, filtering, and pattern spotting in your own notes
That combination can be especially helpful when a teacher, tutor, or family wants to turn repeated practice data into something searchable without changing what students use on the actual exam.
Which Earth Science reference tables for June 2025 Regents?
If you are in the newer Earth and Space Sciences pathway, the 2024 ESSRT is the booklet tied to the first June 2025 Regents Examination in Earth and Space Sciences (NYSED 2024 ESSRT). But the transition is not one-size-fits-all, and some students in 2024–25 were still using the older ESRT depending on course pathway and local implementation (NewYorkScienceTeacher ESRT guidance). The safest answer is still the simplest one: use the booklet your teacher assigns for your course.
What are the half-lives in the radioactive dating table?
For the legacy 2011 ESRT, the most commonly used values are:
- Carbon-14: 5.7 × 10³ years
- Potassium-40: 1.3 × 10⁹ years
- Uranium-238: 4.5 × 10⁹ years
- Rubidium-87: 4.9 × 10¹⁰ years
The same table pairs them with common decay products, including C-14 → N-14, U-238 → Pb-206, and Rb-87 → Sr-87 (NYSED 2011 ESRT).
Where to get official ESRT/ESSRT PDFs?
Start with the official NYSED English PDFs for the two main current-use booklets: the 2024 ESSRT and the 2011 ESRT. For older editions and older translated files, use the NYSED Regents archive. For classroom support materials and access to Spanish/current translated pathways, use the NYS Migrant Earth Science reference-table page. Those four sources cover the main student needs: current English, archived versions, translations, and practice support.
What changed in ESSRT 2024 vs ESRT 2011?
At the big-picture level, the change is from the older Physical Setting/Earth Science booklet to the newer Earth & Space Sciences booklet. The 2024 ESSRT includes a more visible astronomy and space-science structure, with tables for nucleosynthesis, stellar spectra, the H-R diagram, and life cycles of stars, while still keeping core New York geology, weather, tectonics, minerals, radiometric dating, and ocean-current content (NYSED 2024 ESSRT). The booklet also states that it is for classroom use beginning in 2024–25 and for the first June 2025 Earth and Space Sciences Regents exam.
How to print or get Braille versions?
For printing, use a clean PDF, print at full size, and be cautious with archived translated copies because the NYSED archive warns that the 2010 translated ruler may not print exactly to scale depending on printer settings (NYSED Regents archive). For accessible formats, the guidance in NewYorkScienceTeacher says Braille and large-type editions are the versions schools can request directly from State Education, while standard copies are printed from the online files. If you need an accessible edition for class or testing, ask your school or testing coordinator early.
With the right edition, a clean copy, and a habit of fast lookups, the earth science reference tables become an advantage instead of a headache. Verify your version with your teacher, study from the same booklet you will actually use, and practice turning to the right page before trying to solve from memory. If you also want a separate way to organize your own review data, an optional spreadsheet tool can help—but the official NYSED tables should stay at the center of your prep.