Earth and Environmental Systems Major

In the Earth and Environmental Systems Major, students use multidisciplinary approaches to study the large-scale interactions between the Earth and planetary systems over a broad spectrum of time-scales, addressing deep timescales of millions to billions of years as well as processes taking place in today’s and in future worlds. Courses take an integrative approach to understanding interactions between the solid Earth, the biosphere, the atmosphere and the hydrosphere, addressing how these interactions have developed over geological, historical, and recent time periods.

Themes of the program include Earth surface processes (e.g., evolution of landforms and sedimentary basins), paleoclimatology (e.g., drivers of Earth’s natural climate variability), biogeochemistry, Quaternary science (understanding the ice ages) and global environmental change. This program provides broad context over time and space to better understand and provide solutions for the current issues of climate change, resource consumption and global pollution weighing heavily on people and societies.

This program allows you to obtain an Earth Sciences major degree in a very flexible way, with the potential to explore the full gamut of earth sciences. To help with this bewildering array of choices, we provide examples of how you could select your courses. You could, for example, structure your course selection around earth surface processes, or global environmental change. Note that these are only examples, you are not bound by them. For further questions, please contact Scott Moore, the Undergraduate Administrator.

Enrolment Requirements

This is an open enrolment program. A student who has completed 4.0 credits may enrol in the program.

Completion Requirements

8.0 credits including at least 2.0 credits at 300+ level with at least 0.5 credit at 400-level.

Click on the boxes below for the list of courses you may choose from: