Analyses of environmental changes - Focus: Archives

Our entire world is connected through a network of biogeochemical processes. The atmosphere affects the composition of the rain, which affects the vegetation, that - in turn - affects the soil, stream, lake and eventually the sediment that accumulates at the bottom of the lake. The traces these biogeochemical processes leave in the environment can be used to tease out how our environment has changed, and is changing. The aim of this course is to provide knowledge on how different biogeochemical approaches can be used to study environmental change in a broad context. The focus will be on how natural archives (e.g., lake sediments) can be used to understand slow, and gradual, changes that are active over centuries to millennia. During the course we will discuss background/reference conditions, as well as, natural variability and analytical uncertainty, and how these concepts relate to our understanding of both natural and anthropogenic environmental changes.   The course is divided into the following two modules, which run in parallel during the course. Parts of the course are integrated with the course "Analyses of environmental changes - Focus: Long-term environmental problems". Module 1. Analyses of environmental change, theoretical module, 7,5 credits Here we discuss environmental change and, e.g., natural variability from different perspectives, with the overarching aim to increase the student's ability to apply a scientific approach when dealing with a complex problem. The module consists of a combination of lectures, laboratory work, exercises, workshops and/or seminar discussions. Module 2. Analyses of environmental change, project module, 7,5 credits This part of the course consists of projects, where the students couple the theoretical aspects from module 1 to the practical aspects of analyzing environmental changes using biogeochemical methods. The aim of this module is to train the student's ability to use relevant information (e.g., literature and/or analytical data) in a scientific way. This includes how data is collected, how the data is handled and finally how this affects how the data can be interpreted. In addition to practical work, this module can also contain lectures, seminar discussions, workshops and group discussions.