Dear Whole Earth Course Student:

Welcome to the Whole Earth Course! Florida Tech’s instructors and supporting faculty would like to invite you on a voyage of exploration over the next fifteen weeks. This voyage will have six ports-of-call and we will also share many interesting discoveries between harbors. By the end of our journey, we will have gained knowledge in how our home planet functions and more importantly, learned that we need to know so much more to protect our world for succeeding generations.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has funded twenty-two universities to take part in their Earth System Science initiative to study Earth holistically. We at Florida Tech are very proud to have been selected as one of the universities which will develop and teach the Whole Earth Course and a senior-level companion course. (For further information please check out your Whole Earth Course website or http://www.usra.edu/esse/ESSE.html). We are delighted to be part of NASA’s "Mission to Planet Earth" and are very pleased that you have decided to join us in our quest to seek new solutions to the global problems that we all face.

The six ports of call are the following modules:

Upon completion of this course you will be able to:

The faculty that will help all of you along this journey are gathered from three of Florida Tech’s Schools and Colleges to teach the Whole Earth Course. The Cosmosphere module will be taught by Dr. Hamid Rassoul from the Department of Physics and Space Sciences. Dr. Robert Fronk, Chairman of the Science Education Department, will teach the Geosphere module and following faculty from DMES: Dr. Iver W. Duedall, Anthroposphere module; Dr. Steven Lazarus, Atmosphere module; Dr. George A. Maul, Hydrosphere module; and Dr. Kevin Johnson, Biosphere module.