The Department of Earth Sciences was first established in 1984 and has been growing steadily ever since. The primary mission of the department is to nurture students’ independent research and application abilities for their future academic or professional careers. Currently there are 21 full-time faculty members, covering five major research areas in Earth Sciences, including Astronomy (5, with expertise in radio and extragalactic astronomy, planetary science), Atmospheric Sciences (5, specializing in climate modeling and mesoscale meteorology), Geology (5, tectonics, petrology and paleontology), Geophysics (2, seismology and repeating earthquakes), Oceanography (4, physical oceanography, structural geology, and science education). Our program has currently enrolled 160 undergraduate students, ~60 graduate students and ~20 PhD students. To further internationalize, we now offer courses taught completely in English and have recruited several English-speaking non-Chinese faculty members. In addition, we are expecting to hire another faculty member within the next two years.

The Department has been very active in forefront research and rather productive publishing many refereed SCI and SSCI journal papers each year.