Course content:
This course addresses all early career researchers with a decent portion of curiosity about how the Earth system is working on long timescales. Whatever your background (physics, geochemistry, biology, modelling), you will get a new perspective on the planet you live on.
Over the last 4.5 billion years, interwoven interactions between Earth’s biosphere, hydrosphere, geosphere, atmosphere, and climate, under no small influence from the Sun, have driven the biogeochemical cycling of elements like C, H, N, O, P, S, Ca, Mg, Fe, and Si. These interactions have both held Earth habitable and created the occasional climate crisis or mass extinction event, while shaping the Earth’s surface environment. The current state of Earth, its climate, and biosphere and how we got here can only truly be understood within the context of the evolution of life, the history of climate and the biogeochemical cycles, and tectonics. We will explore some of the key tectonic, climatic, and biogeochemical developments over Earth history, such as the origin of life, the oxygenation of the Earth’s surface system, and the last 50 million years of climate cooling into bipolar glaciation.
Day 1: 14:00 - 17:00
- Earth History: time series, proxies, dating
- From the Big Bang to the Sun, planets, Earth & Moon
- Origin and evolution of life
Day 2: 09:00 - 17:00
- Tectonics, volcanism
- Early Atmosphere(s)
- Oxygenation of Atmosphere & Earth
Day 3: 09:00 - 13:00
- N & C cycles & iron
- Si cycle
- Mass extinctions
- From the end of the Cretaceous to today
Target group: Master students, PhD candidates and Postdocs
Pre-requisites: interest in the topic
Our courses are generally free of charge for all participants. However, they do have a price and can cost SEA / the AWI as much as 150 € per day per student. Please take this into account when cancelling your place at the last minute. Please, always send cancellations to sea.courses@awi.de
