Current course offerings

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Course description

This course introduces 2nd year students to the broad field of geochemistry that underpins much of the modern Earth Sciences. Geochemistry is critical to our understanding of low-temperature processes at Earth¿s surface, high temperature processes deep within the Earth and the cosmochemical processes responsible for the birth of our solar system. The course emphasises the use of trace elements and isotopes as tools to fingerprint and track Earth¿s chemical evolution placing the emphasis on geo rather than chemistry. In the first part of the course, you will learn how radioactive elements enable geological processes to be dated, and how variations in trace elements and stable isotope ratios enable the geological processes that have shaped our Earth to be investigated. Using these tools, the course examines evidence for the origin of the chemical elements, the birth of the solar system, the differentiation of the Earth and Moon, and the chemical evolution of the Earth¿s surface reservoirs that have made a habitable planet. The course finishes by examining the extent to which the plate tectonic process of subduction recycles elements from the Earth¿s surface back into the mantle.