Environmental Monitoring, Modelling and Reconstruction MSc
1 Year Full-Time | September Start

Academic skills when studying away from your home institution can differ due to cultural and language differences in teaching and assessment practices. This module is designed to support your transition in the use and practice of technical language and subject specific skills around assessments and teaching provision in your chosen subject area in the Department of Architecture and Built Environment. The overall aim of this module is to develop your abilities to read and study effectively for academic purposes; to develop your skills in analysing and using source material in seminars and academic writing and to develop your use and application of language and communications skills to a higher level.

The topics you will cover on the module include:

• Understanding assignment briefs and exam questions.
• Developing academic writing skills, including citation, paraphrasing, and summarising.
• Practising ‘critical reading’ and ‘critical writing’.
• Planning and structuring academic assignments (e.g. essays, reports and presentations).
• Avoiding academic misconduct and gaining credit by using academic sources and referencing effectively.
• Listening skills for lectures.
• Speaking in seminar presentations.
• Giving discipline-related academic presentations, experiencing peer observation, and receiving formative feedback.
• Speed reading techniques.
• Discussing ethical issues in research, and analysing results.
• Describing bias and limitations of research.
• Developing self-reflection skills.

In this module you will learn how to plan and implement measurements to assess the status of the natural environment. You will learn how to develop appropriate sampling strategies and how to conduct a wide range of methods spanning chemical, physical and biological to gain a thorough understanding of the environment. You will develop a broad range of highly employable skills in collection, modelling and analysis of environmental and socially important data-sets.

Key topics include:

Atmosphere and Air Quality: - How to monitor air quality and climate conditions, and determine if pollutant concentrations could be considered harmful to people. You will become skilled in how to monitor an outbreak of air pollution, and how to apply atmospheric dispersion modelling systems (ADMS) within a GIS environment. You will gain experience in measuring concentrations and isotopic composition on climate
relevant greenhouse gases (e.g. CO2 & CH4). Research examples of GES staff research in applying these techniques will be presented (e.g. application of air pollution monitoring across Newcastle city centre and greenhouse gas tracing in the Arctic).

Contaminated Land and Hydrology: - You will gain skills in assessing land and river state, specifically associated with toxic elements and their behaviour in the environment (e.g. food contamination). You will learn how to assess ecological status in land and waters and their context of national and EU frameworks (e.g. UK water framework directive). You will gain highly employable skills in ‘R’ language coding and use these techniques to assess flood risk assessments.

Coasts and Cliffs: You will learn how to monitor changes in cliff and coastlines using state-of-the-art structure for motion (SfM) mapping of drone data, and how to apply these skills to diverse datasets tracking threats to critical infrastructure (e.g. roads and people) or natural environment (erosion from sea-level rise). You will create digital terrain models using a variety of contemporary platforms in order to monitoring change, e.g. cliff erosion. Research examples of GES staff research applying these techniques to determine coastal retreat rates across North East coastlines, and to assess landslide risks to critical infrastructure will be provided for context.

In this module you will learn to simulate the behaviour of, and interactions between, a selection of Earth’s systems (for example, the cryosphere, atmosphere, ocean, solid Earth). As well as a thorough appreciation of state-of-the-art representation of these systems in the computational domain you will develop an objective understanding of the limitations of such computational models with respect to the processes they intend to capture.

As you learn to operate these Earth System Models (ESMs), you will gain transferable skills in programming languages widely used in both industry and academia. Using these cutting-edge computational models, our teaching staff produce internationally excellent research on the past and future evolution of the polar ice sheets and global climate change. In this module, you will follow on from introductory MATLAB material taught in KE7017: Frontiers in Geoscience in semester 1 and develop advanced programming skills in MATLAB to enable you to contribute the Department’s research activities. You will have the opportunity to explore other languages such as Unix and FORTRAN. You will also gain experience in using Northumbria University’s multi-core High Performance Computing Facility (HPC), “Oswald”, to perform modelling experiments.

On this module, you will learn new field, laboratory and analytical methods in Environmental Reconstruction and apply these skills to addressing a palaeoenvironmental research question. By the end of this module, you will be able to:

* Extract sediment cores for palaeoenvironmental reconstructions and choose the best sites for analysis.

* Understand the theory and application of a range of common proxy analyses (biological, geochemical) for environmental reconstruction.

* Understand the theory and application of radiocarbon dating methods and the construction of age-depth models to establish a chronological framework to understand palaeoenvironmental change.

* Work confidently in the laboratory undertaking data analysis.

* Apply advanced statistics for the analysis of multivariate data.

* Write a report in the style of a peer-reviewed paper.

* Generate new knowledge in the study of past environmental change.

In this module you will learn how cutting edge research into the geosciences is communicated. You will explore many ways in which geoscientific knowledge is produced, disseminated and debated. The fundamental importance of peer-review in the production and dissemination of scientific research will be discussed and you will learn to recognise contemporary scientific challenges. A key skill set that will be introduced is how to summarise and disseminate your understanding to a wide variety of audiences from the expert to the non-expert.

You will develop skills to confidently communicate (orally, graphically and textually) and debate the limitations of current scientific knowledge in specific areas of geoscience with leading researchers.

The skills that you learn will be useful throughout your professional life where understanding how to tailor your presentation style to an audience is of paramount importance.

This module is designed to support you in developing and applying advanced academic and/or practice-based research skills within the context of an appropriate area of contemporary geoscience research. This research area will be your own choice, but will be grounded in, or informed by, staff research and/or local industry links. This could include anything from monitoring coastal change along the north east using drones, to reconstructing tropical environmental change, or computer modelling the behaviour of the Antarctic Ice Sheet. You will ultimately conduct an extended piece of original independent research that contributes to the creation of new knowledge. You will work closely with a research supervisor who will provide you with 1:1 guidance throughout all stages of your dissertation, from the initial project design through to submission of the final extended research project.
You will develop expertise in:
• Planning, developing and executing a substantial piece of independent research.
• Evaluating and applying concepts, models and theories to consolidate and extend your knowledge in your chosen field of study.
• Sourcing, reviewing and synthesising a variety of information sources.
• Gathering, analysing and presenting complex data.
• Effective written, verbal and visual communication to a variety of audiences.
• Applying creative and innovative approaches to problem solving.
• Reviewing appropriate ethical, health and safety, commercial and/or confidential data protection issues associated with your research.

Through a week-long fieldwork trip, you will learn advanced methods of collecting, handling, selecting and presenting data, as well as an appreciation of method limitations. You will make your own measurements of spatial variability in key Arctic environmental variables (e.g. hydrochemistry, vegetation structures for atmosphere- land surface modelling, coring for paleoenvironmental reconstruction).

Through a combination of lectures, seminars and workshops you will learn about research topics at the frontiers of knowledge in earth sciences such as future and past climate changes: what are the big unknowns, what are the urgent problems that need addressing in the near future, and what are some of the ways forward.