Water quality and the biogeochemical engine

Interested in environmental issues, but unsure where to start? This is the course for you! High quality water, to be provided for drinking and irrigation purposes to the world’s ever-growing population, is one Great Challenge in the near future. Explore the links between biology, chemistry and soil science that lead to what people often take for granted: good quality water.

This course is an introduction to environmental sciences. Using only basic knowledge from inorganic chemistry and biology, the course will lead you to an exploration of every day issues around the world. We will tackle some basic questions: Why did the “dust bowl” or the Assouan River dam have so profound an impact on soil fertility? How do we explain the mass poisoning affecting tens of millions of people in SE Asian deltas? Why is nitrate, but not potassium, a pollutant linked to agriculture even through NPK fertilizers are used? Besides plants, are there other photosynthetic organisms? Can we reconstruct wat