GEO 5370 - Environmental Partitioning for Engineers and Scientists

If you’ve ever wondered about odd contamination issues like: why polar bears accumulate PCBs; why it’s so difficult to say whether an oil spill has actually been cleaned up; and why is mercury everywhere but becomes problem only in certain places, then this course may be for you. This course provides a working knowledge for prediction of the partitioning of anthropogenic organic and inorganic chemicals in aquatic and subsurface environments and is designed to allow participation by students from a wide variety of backgrounds including geoscience, environmental engineering and public health. Students are assumed to have had a year of general chemistry. We will briefly review the basics of organic and physical chemistry at appropriate places in the course. While the course style accommodates many backgrounds, it is not a slacker course; you will learn a great deal, and you will emerge with working tools to predict contaminant concentrations in the environment based on their molecular structures and basic characteristics.