The Stanford School of Earth, Energy & Environmental
Sciences, which changed its name from the
School of Earth Sciences in February 2015,
is one of three schools at Stanford awarding
both graduate and undergraduate degrees.
Stanford's first faculty member was a professor
of geology; as such it is considered the oldest
academic foundation of Stanford University.
It is composed of four departments and two
interdisciplinary programs.
Research and teaching span a wide range of
disciplines.
== History ==
Earth Sciences at Stanford can trace its roots
to the university's beginnings, when Stanford's
first president, David Starr Jordan, hired
John Casper Branner, a geologist, as the university's
first professor.
The search for and extraction of natural resources
was the focus of Branner's geology department
during that period of Western development.
Departments were originally not organized
into schools but this changed when the department
of geology became part of the School of Physical
Sciences in 1926.
This changed in 1946 when the School of Mineral
Sciences was established and geology eventually
split into several departments.
== Academics ==
There are four academic departments within
the school; Earth System Science, Geological
Sciences, Geophysics, and Energy Resources
Engineering There are two interdisciplinary
programs housed within the school: the undergraduate
and coterminal master's program Earth Systems,
and the graduate Emmett Interdisciplinary
Program in Environment and Resources.
In addition, the school organizes a master's
degree in Computational Geoscience in collaboration
with the Stanford Institute for Computational
and Mathematical Engineering.
As of February 2015 it had 63 regular faculty
members.The interdisciplinary programs, in
conjunction with the four departments, reach
out to all other schools on the Stanford campus,
the United States Geological Survey (USGS),
and both state and federal policy makers.
The school's library, Branner Earth Sciences
Library, contains over 125,000 volumes, a
large map collection and Stanford's GIS lab
for ongoing GIS reference and research consultation.
=== Rankings ===
The school as a whole was ranked as the third
best Earth Sciences program by the U.S. News
& World Report as of 2014.
(Caltech is ranked no.
1, MIT no.
2, and Berkeley is tied for no.
3).
=== Programs ===
The school offers both undergrad and graduate
degrees.
The majority of the students are graduate
students, with a large contingent of coterminal
master's degree recipients from the Earth
Systems interdisciplinary program.
The school attracts students from all six
of the inhabited continents, and continues
to be one of the most ethnically diverse Earth
Sciences programs in the US.
About 4.0% of Stanford's graduate students
(approximately 360) are in the school and
1.4% of the undergraduates (approximately
100).
=== Research ===
Research programs in the SES continue to make
groundbreaking discoveries about the planet,
its environment, and human interactions.
As a result, there are a number of industry
funded-research groups (i.e.Stanford Exploration
Project, Stanford Wave Physics Laboratory,
Stanford Rock Physics and Borehole Geophysics
Project) that implement student-led research
for industry implementation.
== San Andreas Fault Observatory at Depth
(SAFOD) ==
The San Andreas Fault Observatory at Depth
(SAFOD) is one of three components of the
Earthscope Project, funded by the National
Science Foundation in conjunction with the
USGS and NASA.
The SAFOD site is located just north of the
town of Parkfield, California.
The SAFOD main hole was drilled to a depth
of ~3.4 km in 2004 and 2005, crossing the
San Andreas near a region of the fault where
repeating Magnitude 2 earthquakes are generated.
A goal of this project is to install instruments
to record data near the source of these earthquakes.
In addition to the installation of these instruments,
rock and fluid samples were continuously collected
during the drilling process, and will also
be used to analyze changes in geochemistry
and mechanical properties around the fault
zone.
The project will lead to a better understanding
of the processes that control the behavior
of the San Andreas fault, and it is hoped
that the development of instrumentation and
analytic methods will help evaluate the possibility
of earthquake prediction which is of primary
importance for earthquake engineering.
The project is co-PIed by Bill Ellsworth and
Steve Hickman of the USGS, and Stanford geophysics
faculty member and alum Mark Zoback.
Zoback's research in the SES focuses on stress
and crustal mechanics.
His students are heavily engaged in on-going
research in the Global Climate and Energy
Project
