University College Dublin

The UN has defined seventeen sustainable development goals. At least half of these (e.g. clean water and sanitation, affordable and clean energy, industry, innovation and infrastructure, responsible consumption and production, climate action, life below water, life on land, no poverty and zero hunger, and sustainable cities and communities) have implications for how society exploits Earth's finite resources (e.g. energy, freshwater, minerals, soils, and metals). This course provides geoscience and earth systems perspectives on the opportunities, limitations, and challenges that are likely to arise from the implementation of the UN Sustainable Development Goals. 

People have been living on the island of Ireland for the last 10,000 years. This course tells that human story from early hunter-gatherer times to the present. Students follow the footprints of people through time by means of the spectacular archaeological heritage that is such a central feature of the Irish landscape. This rich and diverse record of monuments, landscapes, and objects is explored and interpreted to provide a narrative of the lifestyles of people in the past. Students study the first settlement of the island, the establishment of farming, and the building of monuments like Newgrange. The course explores Ireland's place in the Celtic world and the lasting impacts of the introduction of Christianity. The richness of the historic archaeological gives a vivid picture of life and society in medieval times and the emergence of modern Ireland. This is an accessible course for students across the range of disciplines and programs. It provides students with a clear understanding of Ireland's past, the Irish landscape, and key times of innovation and change.

This course introduces students to current trends and discussions in American sociology. By looking at a variety of topics (exceptionalism, political sociology, constitutional framework, community, social capital, multiculturalism, religion, urban sociology, popular culture) students get an overall impression of the main developments in American society and how the social sciences have tried to analyze and understand them.

In this course, students are presented with a case study dealing with surface water that is suspected of being polluted. They are instructed in the composition of various environmental media, the nature of potential pollutants and guided through the selection of the media that need to be analyzed to identify the contaminants, sampling locations and the appropriate chemical analyses to address the problem posed. They then organize the collection of the relevant media (soil, water, etc.) and are trained in their chemical analyses in the Environmental Chemistry Laboratory, School of Biology & Environmental Science. The results generated are analyzed with respect to available thresholds/regulations for the various contaminants and students write a report on the full investigation process.

This course explores the geological record of key groups of plant and animals, and what this reveals about their evolutionary biology. The course also discusses how this date informs on the macroevolution of these groups and the different applications in earth and environmental science, including relative dating of rocks, reconstructing paleoenvironments including how ecosystems respond to environmental change at local to global scales.