HISTORY OF THE DEPARTMENT OF EARTH SCIENCES
The Early Years
The Department of Earth Sciences evolved under three influences - the institution that is now known as California University of Pennsylvania, intellectual trends, and technology. Its origin in 1927 at the California Normal School was modest because the Department was originally subsumed under the academic division called Science, Mathematics, and Geography. During the ensuing 59 years the Department acquired no identifiable autonomy and was not delineated from the other disciplines in its division. In 1958, however, California State Teachers College restructured its academic divisions and instituted the Department of Geography. Four years later the Department underwent another name change, becoming the Department of Geography and Earth Sciences at the renamed California State College.
The Modern Department
The 1962 name change reflected a national trend in geography departments. Geography is an inclusive study, but many colleges and universities began to separate the discipline into its component physical and social sciences. Further emphasis on the physical nature of the geographical sciences and intellectual trends toward environmental studies influenced the Department to adopt the title Earth Sciences in 1976. The link to the social sciences was not broken during this reorganization. Initially included in the School of Liberal Arts and Sciences, the Department today maintains its tie to the social sciences by its incorporation maintaining pertinent programs and through General Education coursework. The engendering role of geographical studies has ensured that the Department would continue to offer its socially oriented courses. As a result, the Department offers courses and programs in a variety of both types of sub-disciplines with GIS and Emergency Management (B.A.), Parks and Recreation Management (B.A.), Tourism Studies (B.A.), Tourism Planning and Development (M.A.), Earth Science (B.S. and M.S.), and Geology (B.S.). In addition, several emphases within these programs enable students to specialize in other, related, disciplines, such as Meteorology.
For most of its history the Department was located in Old Science (now Watkins Academic Center), where, at the outset, it used a single room. Before the Department left the building in 1980, it had gained control over the second and third floors of Old Science. Between 1927 and 1935 all geography classes were taught in Room 104. During the next 15 years the Department used the second floor, but with the rise in enrollment at California, the third floor became an important teaching facility for the Department of Geography and Earth Science.
By 1972 the Department expanded its operations with the placement of two of its faculty members in the Frich Biological Science Building, where it acquired two main floor laboratories (224 and 228), a preparation room (225), and two adjacent small offices. At this time the physical separation of the Department reflected, in part, the dichotomy between the social and physical sciences that existed on the national level.
In 1980, California began a restoration project in Old Science that necessitated a move to Noss Hall, where the members occupied and used both floors, sharing teaching space with other departments. In Noss, the Department maintained the department office, two faculty offices, and one large classroom on the first floor and cartography rooms on the second floor.
In 1985, the Department was unified by a move into Frich. Sharing the building with Biological Sciences, the Department had access to several large classrooms (100, 202, and 300) and three laboratories (228, 224, and 204). Department members occupied continued to occupy the offices adjacent to 224 and 228, and, eventually, the office adjacent to 204. The acquisition of 204 added another preparation room to the Department's official space, and the preperation room adjacent to the lecture hall (202) became the "map room." At this time six of the Department's members moved into former preparation rooms in the small corridor at the eastern end of the building, and the Department's office was relocated in a former closet across the hall from the corridor.
The Department remodeled 224 to make an Earth Systems Lab and 228 to make a traditional classroom. It redesiged 204 to accommodate its geological collections and its courses in the geological sciences. In 1998 the Department's six offices in the small corridor were completely remodeled for its final year in Frich. During this time the Department also acquired a basement floor preparation room to use as a shell lab for its extensive, donated collection. The shell collection was the decades-long work of Jack and Cora Izzet, whose children donated the collection to the Department.
In 1999 the Department moved to the new Eberly Science and Technology Center with the main and chair's offices on the first floor (160) and offices on the second floor. The Department currently shares some second floor classrooms (255, 266) with other departments, but has exclusive use of 261 (the Tourism Research Lab), several preparation rooms, a Geoscience lab, on the third floor, a broadcast meteorology studio. The Department has since renovated three labs (Tourism Research Facility, Institute for Analysis of Safety and Security Issues using Spatial Technologies, and the Geosciences Lab). The Department has also offered classes at the Southpointe Campus. This off campus program is a continuation of decades of off-campus outreach by the Department, which has sent members to Oakdale, Swissdale, and Pittsburgh to deliver programs to undergraduate and graduate students.
Off-Campus and Field Work
The off campus efforts of the Department are also part of a decades-long policy that includes field trips and field courses. Members have conducted extended excursion-based courses. These one-to-three week courses have exposed students to diverse sites, such as Yellowstone National Park, the Dells of Wisconsin, southern Canada, the Great Smoky Mountains, the Outer Banks, the Adirondack Mountains, the White Mountains of New Hampshire, the Central Lowlands, the caverns in Kentucky, and the coast of New England. Students have traveled with professors to academic institutions, conferences, and governmental agency headquarters. Numerous field trips to local sites have enhanced courses, clubs, and honorary societies. The Geology Club, Sigma Gamma Epsilon, Gamma Theta Upsilon, the Travel and Tourism Club, and the Meteorology Club have sponsored excursions that were led by the members of the Department. The Travel and Tourism Club has completed trips to both domestic and foreign sites.
Scholarship, Research, and Consulting
Throughout the past two decades the Department has served the local area and state government agencies by conducting research germane to social planning and environmental assessment. The Earth Systems Lab was the center for a Pennsylvania Energy Agency/U.S. Environmental Protection Agency inventory of the state's greenhouse gas emissions ($32,500 funding) and the site where the official state policy on mitigation of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions was written ($17,500 funding). In addition, the Earth Systems Lab was a site for a $113,000 economic analysis of Pennsylvania's potential for developing environmentally friendly (green) technologies. Through the Earth Systems Lab, members of the Department have developed a regional plan in collaboration with six Monongahela Valley communities, and the Hydrology Lab was the center for a watershed monitoring study in cooperation with the PA DEP and the BAMR. The Department has also worked cooperatively with Argonne National Laboratory in an erosion control study ($110,000 funding) and the City of Washington in a revitalization study. Outreach also includes practical workshops in sundry fields, including education and GIS that have been open to the public. With a grant from the USEPA the Department has set up and operated an "Environmental Walking Tour" that has educated both children and adults. Members have also provided workshops for teachers. The diversity of the Department is reflected in these and other outreach efforts.
Members of the Department have published professional papers, workbooks, lab manuals, and textbooks read and used locally, nationally, and internationally, and these efforts are evidence of a Department with a vision of its relevance to comtemporary society. The Department also serves as a research affiliate of the State Data Center with a specialization in population and economic data. Its Weather Center uses three WSI computer weather systems in conjunction with the newly constructed Broadcast Studio and CUTV.
Status of the Department's Graduates
Students of the Department have successfully entered the work force and graduate schools throughout the country. The Department's graduates have pursued further education during the past ten years throughout the country. Schools with the Department's graduates include Kent State University, Akron University, Eastern Kentucky University, West Virginia University, the University of Pittsburgh, the South Dakota School of Mines, Indiana State University, Mississippi State University, the University of Florida, Texas Tech University, the University of Arizona, and New Mexico State University. The Department's graduates who have chosen work over further education are now employed in diverse fields. Many work as geologists, environmental engineers, and environmentalists, and they hold supervisory or managerial positions. Others work as regional, county, and city planners and governmental agents. Still others are consultants, information specialists, demographers, and cartographers. Many of these have risen to supervisory positions, and a few have started and maintained their own successful companies.