Taking the eastern equatorial Pacific as a regional case study, Sea Education Association’s Marine Environmental History Semester will explore the linkages between human activities, environmental concerns, and changing understandings of nature. Through six weeks of coursework on shore, followed by six more weeks working aboard the SSV Robert C. Seamans, students will develop intellectual and firsthand experiential understandings of how we have shaped our maritime world. Courses in Marine Environmental History, Oceanography, and Nautical Science, taught on shore in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, will provide foundations of how oceans systems work, how humans understood and navigated the oceans, and how the oceans have shaped, and were shaped by, these human activities. Students then join the Seamans to continue their work at sea, sailing from Tahiti to the Marquesas and then to Hawaii. While aboard, students will learn to operate the vessel, conduct oceanographic sampling, and go ashore at selected locations to make observations of current environmental conditions. By combining research onshore with the experience of working and researching at sea, students will develop better understandings of how humans have related to and changed their marine environment.

For more information, please contact Matthew McKenzie,
mmckenzie@sea.edu, or got to
http://www.sea.edu/academics/programs.asp.