PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE EARTH SYSTEMS

Short Description: A concentrated field course run out of Biosphere 2 in Oracle Arizona, designed to give practical field experience in the Earth and Environmental sciences from an Earth system view.

Dates: May 20 - June 30.

Duration: 6 weeks.

Credits: 6 points Columbia College credits.

Location: Biosphere 2 in Oracle Arizona and adjacent locals.

Instructor: Paul E. Olsen, Arthur D. Storke Memorial Professor of Geological Sciences of Columbia Univesity and expert staff.

Clientele: Predominately undergraduates and beginning graduate students.

Requirements: Introductory geology and basic chemistry, or instructor's permission.

Cost: $4000 tuition, $1680 room and board (Financial aid is available).

Rationale: Recent years have seen a shift away from discipline-oriented to systems-oriented approaches in the Earth and Environmental Sciences. This change is reflected in basic research and applied fields, the job market, and societal concerns. The teaching of field techniques should reflect this change, but until the advent of Columbia's involvement with Biosphere 2, there was no suitable venue for an appropriate field course. This course is designed to equip students in the Earth and Environmental Sciences with practical and state-of-the-art experience in the use of field techniques that span a broad spectrum of Earth system, environmental, and research problems. It is anticipated that the course will satisfy both traditional undergraduate Geological and Environmental Science field requirements. The combination of the unique Biosphere 2 global change research facility with the incomparable geological and environmental resources within a day's drive of Oracle, will give students a broad view of practical techniques used to understand past, present, and future Earth system problems. No other university has anything comparable.

Course Description: The focus of this course is field techniques applied to Earth systems, including both traditional Earth Science aspects and Ecological/Biological aspects. We will develop most of the course through comparison of two small watersheds near Biosphere 2, observation and participation of experiments in Biosphere 2 itself, and focused field trips to surrounding geological and environmental sites.

The comparison of the watersheds will involve geological, geochemical, geophysical and ecological mapping and sampling techniques, using state-of-the-art methods. One watershed will be more heavily influenced by human activities than the other, although they will be otherwise similar. Rather than just focus on individual components the students will be challenged to understand the behavior of the watersheds as a local system which is part of a regional, and ultimately global system and how those systems are influenced by human activity.

Columbia University-managed Biosphere 2 is the world's largest enclosed facility for understanding the future effects of global change on the biota. Work in this facility will also focus on earth systems, but with even more emphasis on the biological interactions. Experiments that will be underway include the effects of different levels of enhanced CO2 on the growth and ecology of plant communities and agricultural crops. The goal of these experiments is to predict the behavior of the biota under future warming due to anthropogenic greenhouse gasses as well as to understand how to read past levels of CO2 in the geological record.

In addition, the course will take full advantage of adjacent geological, and ecological resources including field trips to the Grand Canyon, Meteor Crater, local volcanoes, the Arizona-Sonoran Desert Museum, and Anasazi native American habitations, with a constant emphasis on natural and anthropogenic causes and effects.

The field and Biosphere 2 work will be supplemented by frequent lectures.