The Earth Sciences Department offers the Master of Science and the Doctor of Philosophy degrees. Graduate students may work primarily with faculty in the Environmental Studies Program as Environmental Earth Sciences Fellows. All levels of students undertake both laboratory studies and field work. The Department of Earth Sciences at Dartmouth offers courses in all major disciplines devoted to the study of the earth, including its structure and development, the oceans and atmosphere, weather and climate, and the properties of other earthlike planets in the solar system. Teaching and research at an advanced level emphasize physical and historical geology, mineralogy and petrology, geophysics and geochemistry, structural geology and plate tectonics, mining geology, and remote sensing of the earth from aircraft and satellites.
Courses cover all areas of geology, including some in which there is no active research program.
Examples are geostatistics, medical geology, natural hazards, oceanography, paleontology, and volcanology. Areas of on-going research are environmental biogeochemistry, isotope geochemistry, ore deposit formation, clay mineralogy, plate tectonics, remote sensing, GIS, processes of and theoretical models of mountain building, dating of sediments, hydrogeology, mass extinction, New England igneous and metamorphic geology, desertification, fluvial geomorphology, and climate change. Research laboratories include facilities for stable and radiogenic isotopes, mass spectrometry, image processing, X-ray diffraction, and instruments for the study of rock magnetism. However, there is interest in any seismically and tectonically active area in the world. The collection includes materials in all the broad fields of interest in the earth sciences, as defined by the American Geological Institute for use in indexing materials for the Bibliography and Index of Geology.