Focusing primarily on the period since 1500, explores the influence of climate, topography, plants, animals, and microorganisms on human history and the reciprocal influence of people on the environment. Topics include the European encounter with the Americas, the impact of modern technology, and the historical roots of the current environmental crisis.

This undergraduate level course presents a basic study in geology. It introduces major minerals and rock types, rock-forming processes, and time scales; temperatures, pressures, compositions, structure of the Earth, and measurement techniques; geologic structures and relationships observable in the field; sediment movement and landform development by moving water, wind, and ice; crustal processes and planetary evolution in terms of global plate tectonics with an emphasis on ductile and brittle processes.

This reading seminar examines land, water, food, and climate in a changing world, with an emphasis on key scientific questions about the connections between natural resources and food production. Students read and discuss papers on a range of topics, including water and land resources, climate change, demography, agroecology, biotechnology, trade, and food security. The readings are supplemented by short lectures that provide context and summarize main points. The seminar provides a broad perspective on one of the defining global issues of this century. Students consider scientific controversies as well as areas of general agreement and examine practical solutions for addressing critical problems.

Examines the ways in which people in ancient and contemporary societies have selected, evaluated, and used materials of nature, transforming them to objects of material culture. Some examples: glass in ancient Egypt and Rome; powerful metals in the Inka empire; rubber processing in ancient Mexico. Explores ideological and aesthetic criteria often influential in materials development. Laboratory/workshop sessions provide hands-on experience with materials discussed in class. Subject complements 3.091. Enrollment may be limited.

This course provides an introduction to the study of environmental phenomena that exhibit both organized structure and wide variability - i.e., complexity. Through focused study of a variety of physical, biological, and chemical problems in conjunction with theoretical models, we learn a series of lessons with wide applicability to understanding the structure and organization of the natural world. Students will also learn how to construct minimal mathematical, physical, and computational models that provide informative answers to precise questions.

This class examines the relationship between the study of natural history, both domestic and exotic, by Europeans and Americans, and exploration and exploitation of the natural world, focusing on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

What is a city? What shapes it? How does its history influence future development? How do physical form and institutions vary from city to city and how are these differences significant? How are cities changing and what is their future? This course will explore these and other questions, with emphasis upon twentieth-century American cities. A major focus will be on the physical form of cities—from downtown and inner-city to suburb and edge city—and the processes that shape them.

These questions and more are explored through lectures, readings, workshops, field trips, and analysis of particular places, with the city itself as a primary text. In light of the 2016 centennial of MIT’s move from Boston to Cambridge, the 2015 iteration of the course focused on MIT’s original campus in Boston’s Back Bay, and the university’s current neighborhood in Cambridge. Short field assignments, culminating in a final project, will provide students opportunities to use, develop, and refine new skills in “reading” the city.

This class examines tools, data, and ideas related to past climate changes as seen in marine, ice core, and continental records. The most recent climate changes (mainly the past 500,000 years, ranging up to about 2 million years ago) will be emphasized. Quantitative tools for the examination of paleoceanographic data will be introduced (statistics, factor analysis, time series analysis, simple climatology).

This class provides a historical survey of the ways that people have interacted with their closest animal relatives, for example: hunting, domestication of livestock, exploitation of animal labor, scientific study of animals, display of exotic and performing animals, and pet keeping. Themes include changing ideas about animal agency and intelligence, our moral obligations to animals, and the limits imposed on the use of animals.

This course introduces the structure, composition, and physical processes governing the terrestrial planets, including their formation and basic orbital properties. Topics include plate tectonics, earthquakes, seismic waves, rheology, impact cratering, gravity and magnetic fields, heat flux, thermal structure, mantle convection, deep interiors, planetary magnetism, and core dynamics. Suitable for majors and non-majors seeking general background in geophysics and planetary structure.

This course is designed to give you the scientific understanding you need to answer questions like: How much energy can we really get from wind? How does a solar photovoltaic work? What is an OTEC (Ocean Thermal Energy Converter) and how does it work? What is the physics behind global warming? What makes engines efficient? How does a nuclear reactor work, and what are the realistic hazards? The course is designed for MIT sophomores, juniors, and seniors who want to understand the fundamental laws and physical processes that govern the sources, extraction, transmission, storage, degradation, and end uses of energy.

This class develops the abilities of students to communicate science effectively in a variety of real-world contexts. It covers strategies for dealing with complex areas like theoretical physics, genomics and neuroscience, and addresses challenges in communicating about topics such as climate change and evolution. Projects focus on speaking and writing, being an expert witness, preparing briefings for policy-makers, writing blogs, and giving live interviews for broadcast, as well as the creation of an interactive exhibit for display in the MIT Museum.

This course examines the science of natural catastrophes such as earthquakes and hurricanes and explores the relationships between the science of and policy toward such hazards. It presents the causes and effects of these phenomena, discusses their predictability, and examines how this knowledge influences policy making. This course includes intensive practice in the writing and presentation of scientific research and summaries for policy makers.

This course analyzes cooperative processes that shape the natural environment, now and in the geologic past. It emphasizes the development of theoretical models that relate the physical and biological worlds, the comparison of theory to observational data, and associated mathematical methods.

This course covers theories about the form that settlements should take and attempts a distinction between descriptive and normative theory by examining examples of various theories of city form over time. Case studies will highlight the origins of the modern city and theories about its emerging form, including the transformation of the nineteenth-century city and its organization. Through examples and historical context, current issues of city form in relation to city-making, social structure, and physical design will also be discussed and analyzed.

This subject deals primarily with equilibrium properties of macroscopic systems, basic thermodynamics, chemical equilibrium of reactions in gas and solution phase, and rates of chemical reactions.

This class serves as an introduction to mass transport in environmental flows, with emphasis given to river and lake systems. The class will cover the derivation and solutions to the differential form of mass conservation equations. Class topics to be covered will include: molecular and turbulent diffusion, boundary layers, dissolution, bed-water exchange, air-water exchange and particle transport.

This studio discusses in great detail the design of urban environments, specifically in Providence, RI. It will propose strategies for change in large areas of cities, to be developed over time, involving different actors. Fitting forms into natural, man-made, historical, and cultural contexts; enabling desirable activity patterns; conceptualizing built form; providing infrastructure and service systems; guiding the sensory character of development: all are topics covered in the studio. The course integrates architecture and planning students in joint work and requires individual designs and planning guidelines as a final product.

Course 12.307 is an undergraduate course intended to illustrate, by means of 'hands on' projects, the basic dynamical and physical principles that govern the general circulation of the atmosphere and ocean and the day to day sequence of weather events.ĺĘ The course parallels the content of the new undergraduate textbook Atmosphere, Ocean and Climate Dynamics by John Marshall and R. Alan Plumb.

In this course we will read and write about works that explore symbolic encounters in the American landscape. Some of the assigned works look at uneasy encounters between ordinary individuals and animals—wolves, eagles, sandhill cranes—that Americans have invested with symbolic significance; others explore conflicts between the pragmatic American impulse to impose order on unruly nature and the equally American inclination to enshrine the unaltered landscape.