Origin of Earth, continents, and life. Continental movements, changing climates, and evolving life.

Origin of Earth, continents, and life. Continental movements, changing climates, and evolving life.

Natural disturbances play a fundamental role in sculpturing landscapes and structuring natural and human-based ecosystems. This course explores the natural and social science of disturbances by analyzing their geologic causes, their ecological and social consequences, and the role of human behavior in disaster reduction and mitigation. Volcanoes, earthquakes, floods, droughts, fires, and extraterrestrial impacts are analyzed and compared.

This course is designed to help students successfully complete their MES Capstone. A set of milestones will be set and regular meetings will be held in groups and individually to aid the student as they complete the research portion of their degree.We will be working together to complete a series of steps towards the final project. These steps fall into five major areas 1) Reviewing the literature; 2) Finding a model; 3) Framing your research; 4) managing data; and 5) Writing your results. Throughout the semester, we will also discuss career goals and the job search. Prerequisite: Project proposal and Online Application equired for course regisration. See MES Office and "Guide to the Capatone" for more information.

Sustainability presents both a challenge and an opportunity for society. Issues like climate change, pollution, resource depletion, and population imbalance are stressing the planet's capacity in ways that threaten our ability to sustain thriving and just societies. At the same time, these systemic problems are unfolding too slowly to prompt most of us to take serious and significant action, or to trigger meaningful responses from our political and business leaders. People equate sustainability with efficiency, waste minimization, and pollution prevention - all worthy goals - but at the current rate of consumption and growth these approaches alone will not create the future of abundance and equity that we desire. To quote author and MIT professor John Ehrenfeld, "Reducing unsustainability - although critical - will not create sustainability." What will it take to extricate us from the current predicament and forge a new path?


In this class, we will examine underlying psychological and cultural barriers to sustainability and discuss strategies for surmounting them. Students will learn leadership competencies and practices to help them more effectively lead change efforts for sustainability. Readings and discussions will explore the application of positive psychology to leverage the human technologies of creativity and collaboration in the pursuit of a more balanced and sustainable relationship with others and our ecosystems, and to shift the sustainability dialogue from the current problem-oriented approach to a vision of human wellbeing and planetary flourishing.

This course explores the nature and use of raster-based geographic information systems (GIS) for the analysis and synthesis of spatial patterns and processes through 'cartographic modeling'. Cartographic modeling is a general but well defined methodology that can be used to address a wide variety of analytical mapping applications in a clear and consistent manner. It does so by decomposing both data and data-processing tasks into elemental components that can then be recomposed with relative ease and with great flexibility.

In order to make sensible decisions on products or projects, people need to understand the environmental impacts of these actions. Life cycle assessment (LCA) is a process to assess environmental impacts throughout the different stages of a product or project's life. This seminar is intended to be comprehensive and covers material extraction, processing, manufacture, distribution, use and end of life reuse, recovery or disposal. The objective of conducting an LCA is to compare the full range of environmental impacts that emanate from the provision of these products or services and then use that information to improve the situation to minimize or eliminate harm. The focus of this class will be to understand the phases of an LCA as well as conduct LCAs that compare the impacts of two related options. This course will enable the student to conduct LCAs and examine the use of software that could be used in this regard.The classic examples are cloth vs. disposable diapers, paper vs. ceramic cups, and so on. This course will enable the student to conduct LCAs and examine the use of software that could be used in this regard. Prerequisite: If course requirement not met, permissionof instructor required.

The aim of this course is to provide an incentive to use geochemical and mineralogical principles to address and solve major environmental problems. The students identify the problems that are associated with different types of waste. This course covers a wide range of problems associated with the waste arising from the generation of electricity. The main topics will be the uranium cycle, characterization of nuclear waste, and the containment and disposal of nuclear waste. Based on insights from the nuclear fuel cycle, solutions are presented that diminish the environmental impacts of coal and biomass combustion products, incineration of municipal solid waste, toxic waste due to refuse incineration, and landfills and landfill gases.

This course covers the fundamentals of atmosphere and ocean dynamics, and aims to put these in the context of climate change in the 21st century. large-scale atmospheric and oceanic circulation, the global energy balance, and the global energy balance, and the global hydrological cycle. We will introduce concepts of fluid dynamics and we will apply these to the vertical and horizontal motions in the atmosphere and ocean. Concepts covered include: hydrostatic law, buoyancy and convection, basic equations of fluid motions, Hadley and Ferrel cells in the atmosphere, thermohaline circulation, Sverdrup ocean flow, modes of climate variability (El-Nino, North Atlantic Oscillation, Southern Annular Mode). The course will incorporate student led discussions based on readings of the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report and recent literature on climate change. Aimed at undergraduate or graduate students who have no prior knowledge of meteorology or oceanography or training in fluid mechanics. Previous background in calculus and/or introductory physics is helpful. This is a general course which spans many subdisciplines (fluid mechanics, atmospheric science, oceanography, hydrology).