Undergraduate Courses
Course Description:
This course provides an introduction to geoscience for majors and non-majors, providing an overview to how the Earth functions as an integrated system. Understanding Earth’s environment requires understanding how the whole Earth functions as a system. This course begins by considering external influences on Earth’s environment and reviewing the systems approach for studying interrelated phenomena, as well as the basic physics needed for such studies. We then investigate four components of the Earth system in detail: the atmosphere, the oceans, the solid Earth, and the biosphere. The course finishes with a discussion of modern anthropogenic climate change. This course is accompanied by a lab course EAS 1600-L.
Reference Textbook:
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Kump, L. R., Kasting, J. F., and Crane, R. G., (2010): The Earth System, 3rd Edition, Pearson; ISBN-13: 978-0321597793.
Course Description:
This course is an introduction to methods used to visualize and understand the history, shape, mechanical structure, and dynamics of the solid-earth system. We will discuss how geophysical tools, including seismology, gravity, magnetism, heat flow, geochronology, and geodesy, are used to understand the age, whole-earth, and near-surface structure, and to quantify the kinematics and dynamics of plate tectonics.
Reference Textbook:
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Lillie, Robert. Whole Earth Geophysics: An Introductory Textbook for Geologists and Geophysicists, 1st Ed., Pearson, May 1998, ISBN-10: 0134905172
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Lowrie, William. Fundamentals of Geophysics. 3rd Ed., Cambridge University Press, Jan. 2020, ISBN-10: 1108716970.
Graduate Courses
Course Description:
This course covers the fundamentals of glacier and ice-sheet dynamics and their application to problems in sea level, paleoclimate, and planetary science. Course content includes glacier observations, mass balance, the material properties and rheology of ice, the basic equations of ice- sheet and -shelf flow, basal processes, the stability and history of ice sheets. This course is targeted at graduate students in climate, geophysics and planetary sciences, but is also appropriate for any undergraduate student with sufficient interest and prerequisite understanding of undergraduate-level mathematics and Earth sciences.
Reference Textbook:
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K.M. Cuffey and W.S.B Paterson, The Physics of Glaciers, B-H, 4th ed.,2010
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C.J. van der Veen, Fundamentals of Glacier Dynamics, CRC Press, 2nd ed., 2013.
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R. LeB. Hooke, Principles of Glacier Mechanics, Cambridge U Press, 2nd ed., 2005
Course Description:
This course is an introduction to methods used to visualize and understand the history, shape, mechanical structure, and dynamics of the solid-earth system. We will discuss how geophysical tools, including seismology, gravity, magnetism, heat flow, geochronology, and geodesy, are used to understand the age, whole-earth, and near-surface structure, and to quantify the kinematics and dynamics of plate tectonics.
Reference Textbook:
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Fowler, C.M.R, The Solid Earth: An Introduction to Global Geophysics, 2nd Edition,
Cambridge University Press, 685 pp., 2005
