Earth & Space Sciences

With accelerating trends such as climate change, water scarcity, energy depletion, social injustice, economic crisis, resource wars, and other challenges, there is a growing need for sustainable alternatives. This course connects guest lectures that describe the severity of the challenges, workshops that discuss the possible sustainable responses, and solutions to those challenges within the context of a specific global city or region. Students have the opportunity to link global challenges to their own local and cultural backgrounds through case studies.

This course offers a broad overview on the fossil record of plants with special emphasis on evolution and biodiversity changes since the Palaeozoic. In this course basic principles of plant evolution from the Palaeozoic to present-day are discussed. The major steps of terrestrialization are placed into a comprehensive overview on feedbacks between large-scale geosphere processes such as plate tectonics, atmosphere-biosphere interactions, and the global carbon cycle through time. The second goal is to critically reflect on natural dynamics of biodiversity versus modern biodiversity loss, the human induced “mass-extinction” of the 21st century. The course includes assignments such as rock and fossil labs, computer aided labs, and a one day practical held in the botanical garden.

This course examines the processes of geological hazards and how they impact on society, with some attention given to techniques and strategies for hazard mitigation. It covers earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, liquefaction, rockfall, and flooding.

This course covers heat budget of the Earth, heat transport to the Earth´s surface, geothermal systems and their structure, renewability of geothermal systems, methodology in geothermal development, estimation of resource size, fluid origin and chemistry, water-rock interaction, environmental impact of utilization, and well testing and well data integration.