Introduction to the special section on environmental physics

Abstract

This special section of European Journal of Physics brings together a series of articles dedicated to examples of environmental physics. Physics is above all an underpinning science and one that plays a crucial role in understanding the environment and the major issues that confront the world today. The social and political problems of global warming, ozone depletion, the spread and consequences of pollution, and the development and exploitation of energy sources all require an understanding of the basic underlying physics. Similarly, our ability to model and thence predict our weather and climate requires knowledge of many disparate physical processes. Environmental physics, as its name implies, is the application of the principles of physics to problems in the natural and man-made environment. It plays a pivotal role in exploring, monitoring and, above all, understanding the world we live in, and humanity's effect on it, both on local and global scales [1].In the 1980s, with the discovery of the ozone hole and increasing interest in the observation and effects of `acid rain', the topic of `environmental' or `green chemistry' was developed and adopted by many universities' chemistry departments as a core part of their undergraduate teaching programme. Physics departments were initially slower to appreciate the growing interest in, and need for, training in environmental studies. However, today most physics departments provide at least one undergraduate course in which the environmental applications of physics are explored. Several successful environmental physics undergraduate degrees are now offered worldwide, together with Masters and postgraduate options. Environmental issues have now also become an integral part of school science programmes, encouraging a new generation of students to appreciate (and study) physics. However, the teaching of environmental physics should not be simply an extension of a physics class with examples of physical laws and principles given an environmental slant; instead it should be taught with the intention of describing the environmental problem/issue and using physics to demonstrate how it may be investigated and/or quantified.European Journal of Physics has published many articles in recent years demonstrating the application of physics to environmental issues. However, in this special section we wish to demonstrate something of the diversity of topics while giving the reader examples of how to teach the subject. In the first article, Egbert Boeker, Rienk van Grondelle and Piet Blankert (the first two being authors of the text book Environmental Physics [2]) describe how they have developed the teaching of environmental physics to undergraduates. Piet Blankert and Jan Mulder then detail some laboratory experiments that they have used to demonstrate the role of key physical principles in the environment. They have established a website that lecturers and teachers might use to construct their own experiments. Johan Bohman, Bertil Dynefors and Sharon Kühlmann-Berenzon have taken physics out of the classroom and for several years run a successful field campaign requiring their students to develop their own experimental programme. Ross Reynolds explains how our understanding of the environment has been revolutionized by the use of satellite technology which now may be directly accessed from any PC. Finally, as an example of how physics is being used to explain our weather, John Mason and I discuss the physics underlying a thunderstorm, an example of the diversity of physics necessary to explain any natural phenomenon.In reading these papers it is hoped that the reader will gain an appreciation of how physics is essential to studying our planet and ensuring its future development. Only by training the next generation of students in physics will we be able to meet the challenge of how humanity's increasing impact on the delicate environmental/ecological balance of the Earth may be tempered and controlled. It is the responsibility of those teaching physics to the current and future generations of students to ensure that its importance to the development of environmental research is as great as in the more `traditional' physics research topics of nuclear and particle physics, cosmology and astronomy. European Journal of Physics will therefore welcome further examples of how physics is being taught in an environmental context. It is hoped that these five papers will act as a stimulus and catalyst for further papers from the physics community.