What are the prognoses for delta systems and their inhabitants when river discharges and the risk of flooding increase?
How can satellite images be used to estimate erosion losses?
What happens to an oil spill as it enters the soil and groundwater, and how can it be cleaned most efficiently?
What role can peatlands play in global climate change by buffering increases in atmospheric carbon?
How do changes in climate and land use affect large river systems?
Processes at or near the Earth’s surface
Earth Surface and Water is the study of physical phenomena within the Earth's environment, their spatial and temporal characteristics and relationships and the evolution towards our modern landscape. Physical geographers and hydrologists can be important as identifiers of nature's action in our modern world because of society’s ever-increasing pressure on the natural environment.
Wide range of societal problems
The themes represent decades of knowledge relating to coastal and river sciences, hydrological processes, land degradation in mountainous regions and Quaternary geology. The programme covers a wide range of societal problems, such as society’s increased vulnerability to climate change, to natural hazards such as flooding, to storms and mass movements, as well as the adverse effects of human activity on our physical environment, including the impact on the hydrological cycle.
Working on different scales
Earth Surface and Water has a strong international profile, based on its pioneering work and international expertise in the field of Environmental Modelling and Geographical Information Systems (GIS) and the development and application of Geostatistics. The programme also considers water-related aspects, such as the climate and the environment, bioremediation and virus transport in subsurface water.
Master's programmes in Earth Sciences:
