The Dr. Moses Strauss Department of Marine Geosciences (DMG) is a leading edge, sea-going facility, established in 2007. DMG combines research and graduate studies of the marine environment in the following main disciplines: observational geophysics, mapping and remote sensing, geodynamics, tectonics, marine and coastal sedimentology, geochemistry, and chemical and physical oceanography. DMG comprises one of the center-poles in the multidisciplinary framework of the Charney School of Marine Sciences (CSMS), the only sea-going academic facility in Israel. Currently, the DMG faculty includes 7 senior members and 6 adjunct faculty members.
Recent significant deep-sea gas (and possibly also oil) finds in Israel's Mediterranean offshore prompts decades of unprecedented development, and poses world class scientific technical and environmental challenges. DMG and CSMS are playing a leading role in addressing these challenges.
The department is located in the Multi-Purpose building on the main campus of the University of Haifa. It was established thanks to the generous donations presented by Mr. Leon H. Charney and Mr. Ernest Strauss. DMG is academically anchored in the Faculty of Natural Sciences. The department works in close collaboration with Israel Oceanographical and Limnological Research institute (IOLR), and is operationally supported by Recanati Institute of Maritime Studies (RIMS).
Studies conducted in the Department of Marine Geosciences utilize advanced methods of data acquisition, processing and analyses to decipher processes and phenomena that occur in the marine geosphere. Over the last decade, the growing concerns regarding global changes, the search for new energy sources and the emergence of unprecedented developments that offer new avenues of research have brought geo-marine studies to the focus of global interest. Research topics in this field are numerous, encompassing various disciplines that interact in a way that demands a holistic research approach: from the structure of the seafloor, the Earth’s crust underneath it, and the search for energy sources (oil, gas, hydrates), to the dynamics of the water body above it, sea level changes and their relation to tectonic and climate changes, coastline developments in present and past times (e.g., collapse of cliffs) and, finally, present and past influences on human evolution.