The University of Chicago Department of Geophysical Sciences

Ray Pierrehumbert playing accordion at the liquidus. "We're drawing attention to the vast body of literature accumulating, which says when it comes to global warming, we may not be just looking at a different climate, but one that is more variable from year to year than our present climate. Think about what would happen if one year we had 105-degree heat waves, then the next decade we had unusually cold winters, and then we had 50 years of drought. It would be very hard to adapt to that kind of climate." (See also Science Fiction Atmospheres...)

"I want future congressmen to know something about science in general and about earth sciences in particular. And I want those future lawyers and nonprofit professionals and business executives, as well as voters in general, to have as broad a perspective as possible about how the Earth works and the interactions between the biosphere and the geosphere."

“You could convince yourself that you’re in Kansas, except that you’re breathing a little too hard.”

"It was one of those curiosity questions that you get asked after a lecture that has nothing to do with the lecture," LaBarbera said. The student came up and asked, "Why don't animals have wheels?" LaBarbera gave the stock answer. (see also, B Movie Monsters...)

"I came here from graduate school as an Assistant Professor, and the first class I ever taught was attended by two of my senior-professor faculty colleagues. That scared the living crap out of me."

"The story of life is a spectacular, strange, quirky history where there are booms and there are busts. There are fantastic explosions of evolutionary creativity. There are times of stagnation. There are extremely dramatic crashes, like the extinction that killed off the dinosaurs because of an asteroid impact 65 million years ago. It's just a very dramatic story. And it's a great vehicle for teaching the principles of evolutionary biology, which is really what this course is all about."

"Other universities have analytical chemistry courses where students do instrumental analysis. This teaching laboratory is unusual in that it is dedicated to environmental science. I haven't heard of anything else like it."

“No matter what argument you put forth, people say, well, that’s crazy. That doesn’t make any sense. A 20-foot-tall fungus doesn’t make any sense. Neither does a 20-foot-tall algae make any sense, but here’s the fossil. It had to be something.”

“It’s such a large discrepancy, we ended up concluding that it’s difficult, if not impossible, to maintain that there are 65 million years of fossils missing from the history of modern placental mammals."

New professor Liz Moyer participates in hydroacoustic research in Glacier Bay Alaska.

"After the big bang, it did not take much time for large structures to form, including our Milky Way galaxy."

“I heard a detonation. It was sharp enough to wake me up.”

“From an evolutionary perspective, the more variable a species is, the more raw material natural selection has to operate on.”

"The actual demo in the lab is a great teaching tool," said Nakamura. "We would like to share our experience because we are among only a handful of universities in the nation that has the capability to teach weather and climate by using physical labs."

Robert Clayton receiving the 2004 National Medal of Science at the White House.

Noboru Nakamura, Professor in Geophysical Sciences, in the Dave Fultz Laboratory at the University of Chicago. The computer screen shows an image looking down on a weather simulation captured by a camera mounted on the ceiling.

"Meteorology isn't my vocation. When you're done taking this course, you won't be able to forecast the weather any better than you do now...but you will know a lot more about environmental problems."