Handbook

Imagine a world of wildly escalating temperatures, apocalyptic flooding, devastating storms and catastrophic sea level rise. This might sound like a prediction for the future or the storyline of a new Hollywood blockbuster but it is something quite different: it’s our past. When we’re bombarded with worrying forecasts for the future, it seems hard to believe that such things could come to pass. Yet almost everywhere we turn, the landscape is screaming out that the world is a capricious place. But if we don’t tune in, the message is lost. In a day and age of environmental crises, we need to urgently decipher the past and learn from it.

This next decade will be a period of profound change. Under pressure from accelerating decline in the state of the environment, the world in the 2020s will be when the impacts of climate change sadly become all too apparent. The enormity of what society faces is deeply alarming. It is in this next decade that radical transformations must be achieved at an unprecedented scale if we are to have any hope of meeting the international agreements set out by the 2016 Paris Climate Agreement and United Nations 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

There is an urgent need for graduates who can work across different disciplines and timescales; who can bring ideas together to help find solutions. Past environmental changes provide valuable insights into how our planet works and what this means for the future. The aim of this course is to provide you with a critical understanding of environmental changes and their impacts. Over the ten weeks we will delve into some of the great scientific and archaeological questions about what happened when...and why it matters. And to achieve this we will provide you with a range of key skills and capabilities for the future, regardless of whether you pursue a career in science or not.

GEOS3761 is delivered as a blended course. As a result, the content is provided through a combination of online material (including short films, quizzes and virtual field trips) and face-to-face practicals (with the option to take the latter online). The course has a Moodle Discussion Forum which provides an opportunity for you to engage with everyone on the course, supported by optional, informal one-hour sessions, where we will be discussing recent environmental stories in the news and answering any questions you might have.