Course Introduction

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By the time today's undergraduates send their children to college, there will be more than eight billion people on Earth. Our climate will be punctuated by extreme weather events. One or more major metropolitan areas may have experienced a devastating earthquake or volcanic eruption. Energy resources will be strained and more expensive. This world requires both an Earth literate public and a workforce that can bring geoscience to bear on tough societal issues. Developing widespread Earth literacy and this workforce are the objectives of the InTeGrate project.

InTeGrate is a 5-year, NSF-funded STEP Center grant, running from 2012 through 2016. The STEP (STEM Talent Expansion Program) Center program enables "a group of faculty representing a cross section of institutions of higher education to identify a national challenge or opportunity in undergraduate education in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) and to propose a comprehensive and coordinated set of activities that will be carried out to address that challenge or opportunity within a national context." This course was developed through the InTeGrate STEP grant. For more information see the InTeGrate Project.

Water is a particularly critical component of Earth's sustainability. In fact, water may be THE most critical part. Here are direct facts which convey the magnitude of the current global water emergency.

  • Nearly 1 billion people are living without accessible water
  • 2.5 billion without adequate sanitation
  • 440 million school days lost
  • 220 million hours each day are spent collecting water
  • 3.7 miles walked each day by women and children
  • 4100 children under five die each day from preventable water-related illness
  • 3.4 million people die each year from preventable water-related disease

More than any other resource, with the exception of food, water is crucial for human survival. Ancient civilizations were repeatedly forced to deal with the threat of diminishing water supply. Now, climate change presents a new threat by causing the supply and distribution of water to change over coming decades and centuries. This situation will be made significantly more dire by explosive population growth in parts of the world where water is scarce and by pollution that will continually limit the supply of clean drinking water. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2007 stated the situation very clearly: “Water and its availability and quality, will be the main pressures on, and issues for, societies and the environment under climate change.”

Course Goals

Upon completing this course, you will be able to:

  • Describe the two-way relationship between water and human society
  • Explain the distribution and dynamics of water at the surface and in the subsurface of the Earth
  • Synthesize data and information from multiple reliable sources
  • Interpret graphical representations of scientific data
  • Identify strategies and best practices to decrease water stress and increase water quality
  • Thoughtfully evaluate information and policy statements regarding water resources
  • Predict how human interaction with water on Earth is expected to change over the next 50 years
  • Communicate scientific information in terms that can be understood by the general public