The Earth and Climate Sciences (EACS) curriculum provides the fundamentals of engaging science while illuminating the power of scientific literacy in informing social issues, thus better preparing students to be engaged citizens. Our emphasis is to make EACS directly applicable to our students’ lives, their career and political decisions, and their roles as good citizens and stewards of the planet.  These approaches will only become more important as decisions about increasingly scarce resources and our rapidly changing climate and environment need to be made.

The Earth and Climate Sciences (EACS) are key to addressing scientific issues relating to energy, mineral, and water resource security, ecosystem and environmental stewardship, hazards risk assessment, adaptation and mitigation, and climate variability and change. In EACS, we strive to instill in students a life-long curiosity of the earth and its climate system across vast spatial and temporal scales. We seek to prepare students for professional careers, as well as to be well-rounded and well-informed, engaged citizens who use their expertise ethically to contribute to equity and social and climate justice.

Experiential learning is at the heart of our curriculum.  We provide inclusive field, experimental, analytical, and computational experiences for students to collect and analyze real datasets from our 100-level courses up through our senior theses.  At the introductory level, students are mapping outcrops and glacial deposits, measuring water quality of local water bodies, and working with big datasets to track regional climate change.  At the 200-level, students are modeling earth systems and climate change, engaged in mineralogy research, measuring coastal erosion, and are understanding the structural and geological history of the area. At the 300-level, students take a deep dive in any one of several classes exploring climate change, tectonics, petrology, and geochemistry or undertake an independent study with a faculty member.  Our teaching and research programs are grounded in the fundamentals of field, laboratory, modeling, and experimental techniques, yet ever-evolving to incorporate state-of-the-art tools and technologies. The students, staff, and faculty of the Department of Earth and Climate Sciences are actively engaged in the college community, in the Lewiston/Auburn and Maine communities, and in the scientific community.