At the core of the EOAS community is a program of exploration, focused on the hydrosphere, cryosphere, geosphere, atmosphere and biosphere of our home planet and its neighbors, as well as their evolution over time. The breadth and depth of our faculty’s expertise are our central strengths. Our more than one hundred faculty members explore a wide swath of the Earth system – from the poles to the tropics, from Earth’s core and deep ocean ecosystems to its polar ice sheets and stratosphere. Their research spans from the earliest days of the solar system to the coming centuries of climate and ecological change. We have strong disciplinary expertise across the oceanographic, atmospheric, cryospheric, geological, geographic, hydrological, and ecological sciences. EOAS’s role is to help sustain and grow research capacity within and across these disciplines.
One driver of EOAS’s mission is an ethic of planetary stewardship. As New Jersey’s state university and land-grant university, Rutgers has a special responsibility toward our home state, which is currently experiencing rapid climatic and ecological change. Our deep ties within the state, combined with our institutional history of collaboration among Earth system sciences, environmental social sciences, and environmental policy, make the EOAS community well-suited for tracking the regional effects of environmental change, developing an integrated understanding of our changing regional Earth system, and leveraging observations and scientific knowledge to inform the civic stewardship of our corner of the planet. EOAS’s role is as a hub for research, education, public engagement, and policy engagement related to this regional stewardship mission.
EOAS’s stewardship mission is not limited to our state alone. New Jersey’s path of urbanization is now being followed around the world, and the lessons learned here can inform the planet’s numerous rapidly urbanizing regions. Our faculty have global networks of collaborators and are actively engaged in a variety of international institutions. Leveraging both our strong New Jersey roots and our global networks, EOAS’s role is to facilitate the development and testing of frameworks for integrating Earth system science, environmental social sciences, and environmental governance to advance sustainability, resilience, and planetary health in a rapidly urbanizing world.