GRANDE: Geoscience Program Adaptation to Natural Disruptive Events

Geoscience departments, like all units of an institution, must adapt to changing conditions during the recovery phase from a natural disruptive event. However, as the discipline that understands the causes, impacts, and risks of such natural events, geoscience departments also have the opportunity to lead the way in adaptation and mitigation, leveraging the recovery and rebuilding experiences for enhanced educational and research opportunities. This constructive opportunity exists, but the nature and experiences of geoscience programs' responses to impacts are not uniformly understood across the spectrum of natural disruptive events. An understanding of past responses can lead to the development of a knowledge base of best practices, prospective opportunities, and community-wide awareness of ways the geoscience discipline needs to prepare for a future that is predicted to have increasing disruptive climate-related events.

We seek to analyze the scope of impact from natural disasters on geoscience departments within the United States and the experiences of how those specific departments have responded to these events as organizations, as educational entities, and as principals in the science of the impacting processes. Recent experiences with a different type of disruptive event, the COVID-19 pandemic, have demonstrated remarkable resilience and creativity among geoscience faculty and departments to adapt instructional formats and maintain instructional continuity despite rapid institutional shifts during the recovery phase.