Earth and Space Minor

This is a joint minor between the Astronomy and Earth and Environmental Science Departments.
Geology and Astronomy share a unique feature in science: they both study unreachably remote places in time and space. They are driven by observation of the natural world and their experiments must often use proxies for the quantities of interest. And they are both subjects of great interest to the general public. These cultural similarities between the disciplines motivates the “Earth and Space” Minor. Combining introductory courses in two Departments, students who participate in this minor will:

— Gain a solid sense of the scales we study in both space and time,
— Examine the Earth in some detail as a representative of the ~6000 planets now known
— Situate Earth’s place in the cosmos
— Appreciate what it means for life to have evolved on this particular planet, and
— Obtain a solid grounding in the quantitative reasoning skills scientists use.