Welcome to GEOG 441/541!

The Geography of Mars course is the first geography of Mars class ever offered as a regular course in any university ... on Earth.

Missions to Mars have been flown since the 1960s, and Mars has had an extraordinary number of successful missions in the last quarter century. These have yielded huge amounts of data, which have been processed into spectacular imagery that offer more information in some cases than we have for Earth! These data and images have often upended our understanding of Mars: It's as though our questions are growing far faster than our answers. Mars has a quality about it that invites interpretation in terms of what we know about Earth but then proceeds to undermine these analogies ... and sometimes make us wonder if we understand Earth as well as we think we do. Mars truly is the "yes, but ..." planet! Becoming familiar with Mars gets really addictive!

Catalogue Description

Prerequisite/Corequisite: GEOG 130 or GEOG 140 or GEOL 102 or consent of instructor. Introduction to the geography of Mars, providing a physical regionalization of the Martian surface and climate and an understanding of underlying tectonic, geomorphic, and meteorological processes. The course reviews remote sensing fundamentals and data sources for geographical analysis of Mars. Letter grade only (A-F). (2 hours seminar, 2 hours activity).