About

Recent deep-sea gas discoveries offshore Israel pose world-class scientific, technical and environmental challenges. These significant developments provide students with career opportunities in disciplines such as exploration geophysics and environmental geology.

Using the eastern Mediterranean as a natural marine laboratory, the Department provides students with a unique opportunity to develop practical scientific experience at sea together with a rigorous academic curriculum. Study programs combine coursework with deep sea, coastal and underwater field excursions, as well as geological field trips to coastal marine structures.

The Dr. Moses Strauss Department of Marine Geosciences (DMG), academically linked to the Faculty of Natural Sciences, 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.

Studies conducted in the Department of Marine Geosciences utilize advanced methods of data acquisition, processing and analysis to decipher phenomena that occur in the marine geosphere. Over the last decade, the growing concern regarding global change, the search for new energy sources and the emergence of unprecedented developments that offer new avenues of research have created global interest in geo-marine studies. 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.