Earth History

Undergraduate catalogue cross-listing

Earth records its own history in rocks, chronicling catastrophes like meteorite impacts, gradual processes with outsized consequences such as erosion, and pivotal turning points like global glaciation and mass extinction. Imagine Earth's 4.5 billion year history as millions of overlapping crime scenes with much of the evidence wiped away. In this class, you are the forensic detective, learning the observational and analytical techniques needed to decode the interacting forces that created the planet we know today and learning to recognize what we still do not understand.