Earth and Marine Sciences

It's a big thing, planet earth, and the bits of it that aren't made up purely of rocks tend to be covered with sea, so earth and marine sciences are pretty fundamental to our very existence.

The two disciplines, rocks or water, are very different, but either way, you'll be interested in the environment and the evolution ofthe planet and its oceans. As environmental awareness increases, so does interest in the courses, so applications are rising and competition for places is growing. The students, though, tend to have at least one thing in common - they're likely to be the out-doors type, not averse to the worst weather known to field trips.

The major earth science is geology and is concerned primarily with rocks and derivative materials that make up the outer part of the planet earth. As is increasingly the case with most sciences, you'll be taking a multidisciplinary approach, making use of knowledge gleaned from other fields, such as physics, chemistry and biology, and even looking for clues from other planets as to how the earth has ended up as it has.

You'll study landforms and other surface features of the earth, but also be concerned with the structure and inner parts of the planet, all highly useful if you're searching for useful minerals or looking for stable environments to build in, or trying to predict earthquakes or the eruptions of volcanoes.

The ocean sciences, meanwhile, are similarly multidisciplinary as they search for the factors that drive these mind-boggling masses of water and can be, roughly, divided into four disciplines: marine biology (the study of marine plants and animals), marine geology (the study of the composition and formation of the seabed), marine chemistry (the chemical composition of seawater, pollutants and so on), and marine physics (the study of wave formation, ocean currents, water temperature, density and tides). The term ocean sciences can, therefore, touch on a number of those areas, and, as with geology, will require some level of expertise in a number of areas.

For both courses, you'll spend time dabbling across the sciences, before really hitting the specialisations in the final run-in, in areas such as the sea's oil reservoirs or micropalaeontology.

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