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Preparing a new generation of citizens and scientists to face earth's future.

Article Excerpt
How Much will global temperatures rise over the next century? How fast will ice sheets on Antarctica and Greenland melt and raise global sea level? Will rising temperature and acidification of the oceans extinguish corals and other endangered marine ecosystems? Will global warming cause hurricanes more powerful than Andrew and Katrina? What triggers the massive earthquakes that cause large tsunamis such as the devastating 2004 Indian Ocean event? These questions of habitability, sustainability, and survival are driving a surge of research in earth system science, a field that incorporates atmospheric science, earth science, ecology, and oceanography. Moreover, they are transforming the field from one that focused on the past to the that is increasingly forward-looking, aided by major advances in instrumentation and computational power.

As the research interests and the focus of traditional earth scientists are transformed, so too must education in earth system science at colleges and universities across the country change. The required change involved not only the methods we use to teach this new science, but also the essential place of the earth sciences in the panoply of disciplines as traditionally ordered by our academic colleagues. With growing public and political awareness of the significant environmental problems facing the earth in the coming decades, and the realization that issues such as global warming require action on the part of individuals as well as governments, earth system science must establish its place in college curricula to ensure that a new generation of citizens and scientists is prepared to meet future challenges.

To earth scientists, all of this is self-evident. But it is not always so within the broader communities of the academy. We hear, for example, that the twenty-first century will be the "Century of Biology." Earth science courses, faculty, and departments are often the first casualties of...

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