Earth & Environment

Our mission: to understand a changing Earth, its relationships with humankind, and to develop strategies for a sustainable future. A central, overarching theme in the department is climate science, which represents the defining and unifying earth and environmental science issue of the 21st century. The coupled natural and human dimensions of climate change infuse our research, whether that may be in the form of climate reconstructions from marine and terrestrial archives; predicting regional climate variability from the analysis of historical data and modeling; understanding the impacts of climate change on nutrient cycling, plant communities, and the biogeochemistry of natural and urban ecosystems; predicting the consequences of climate-change mitigation and adaptation for energy markets; or assessing climate change risks on agriculture and the implications for regional food security, among many other active areas of research.