Hi, my name is David Schultz, I'm a professor here in the School of Earth, Atmosphere and Environmental Science at the University of Manchester. I am teaching a course called Our Earth, Its Climate, History and Processes, and its goal is to get you to think about not only how the earth works, but how we as scientists know how it works. It's a low key but informative course, basically, I want to get you to learn to think like a scientist. I have several goals for this course, first, I want to challenge how you understand the way the Earth works, and we're going to do that by including some new and exciting discoveries that scientists are making about the way the Earth works. We're going to talk about how the land, air, water, and ice have affected how life has evolved, and in turn, we will look at how life has affected how land, air, water, and ice have evolved as well. We’re going to look at some of the collections from the Manchester Museum on campus here, where we will see firsthand the kind of creatures that we will talk about in lectures. So, that’s what we have got in store for you during the lectures, but I want this course to be fun, and for that we've got a couple extra special treats for you. The first is the Build Your Own Earth application. Here, you will get to design your own Earth, its characteristics, you'll get to play with different distributions of land, sea, mountains, and plains, and see how the ocean and the atmospheric circulation change under these different distributions. The second treat we have in store for you is the Google Earth field trip. Here we'll take you on a global tour of some of the things that we've seen and talked about in lecture so that you can see the effect that these features have had on the Earth's climate. Well, are you still thinking of signing up? Let me tell you just a few of the facts that you'll learn in this course. First, did you know that the gulf stream is not responsible for the warm temperate climate that we experience in Western Europe despite the conventional wisdom that it is? Second, that 251,000,000 years ago that 95% of all life was extinguished from this planet and we still don't know preciously why. And third, three quarters of the Earth's history was occupied by one type of life alone, single celled organisms. So I look forward to meeting you when I offer the course, Our Earth, Its Climate, History, and Processes.
