This course will introduce you to the processes that create terrestrial planets such as ours – you will learn about the forces driving plate tectonics, volcanic eruptions, climate change and biological evolution, and how to understand these processes by studying rocks, minerals and fossils.
We will start by looking at the Earth’s internal engine: What controls our magnetic field? What drives plate tectonics? How do we make and break supercontinents? Then we introduce minerals; the building blocks of a rocky planet. We will learn how the physical and chemical properties of different minerals follow a logical pattern, and are therefore useful as a tool to understanding how and where different rocks form. Building on this we will study igneous and metamorphic rocks, looking at the theory of where on Earth they are made and followed by practical investigation of rocks and minerals in hand-specimens and using a petrological microscope. We end this half of the course by looking at what makes the Earth a habitable planet, touching on the evolution of life and a practical look at fossils and geological time.
The second half of the course will focus on processes going on at the Earth’s surface. How do the atmosphere and oceans interact and link to climate? How can we detect this in the past and understand palaeoenvironments? Finally, we will look at the evolution of the Earth’s climate record over the last 500 million years. What controls climate changes over long-, medium- and short-time scales? We will look at how these changes can be tracked over geological time, using a combination of the rock record, sea-floor sediments and ice-core records.
Interactive lectures will introduce the concepts, followed by practical hands-on studies of rocks, fossils and minerals and a visit to the world-famous Sedgwick Museum.
Learning outcomes
- To gain an understanding of the interior of the Earth and how it contributes to the distribution of continents and oceans on the surface, our long term climate history and the evolution of life;
- To be able to make observations from rocks, minerals and fossils and to use them to understand where they came from and to know why they might be found there;
- To better understand the evolution of our planet over the last 500 million years.
