📚About the Program
Master’s in Geology at East Carolina University
Can you picture yourself roaming the Alaskan wilderness looking for new sources of gold, copper, and other economic minerals? Are you interested in investigating and helping to solve the environmental problems associated with exploiting hydrocarbon energy resources using state-of-the-art procedures such as fracking and horizontal drilling? Would you like to help communities develop new groundwater supplies? The emphasis of the 30-semester-hour MS program in geology is in coastal geology, environmental geology, hydrogeology, and solid Earth geology. It attracts students, in part, due to the location near North Carolina's coastal system that includes extensive barrier islands and the second largest estuarine system in the United States. However, because our civilization is based upon acquisition and wise development of natural resources such as oil, gas, and minerals, increased emphasis has recently been placed on these sub-disciplines. Students in the program conduct research that contributes to the discovery and proper management of these resources and are encouraged to take advantage of state-of-the art laboratories, analytical equipment (X-ray diffraction, X-ray fluorescence, gas chromatography/mass spectrometry, ICAPES), field equipment, and research vessels enabling pursuit of a wide variety of projects. The department teaches and trains students in areas of great societal and global significance, such as environmental geology, economic geology, hydrogeology, climate change, structural geology, and petroleum geology. The importance of geology to the nation's future is reflected in the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimate of an 18-percent job growth for earth scientists from 2008 to 2018.
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