SPACE-GEOLOGY
Methods for multiscale Earth science modelling
Florian Franziskakis 
Sébastien Biass
Grégory Giuliani
Welcome to the SPACE GEOLOGY course!
This is a practical course that explores what cutting-edge computing and Earth observation tools can bring to the modern scientist’s toolbox. Through concrete applications at the global scale (for example, reconstructing geology, climate, and landscapes over hundreds of millions of years) and at the local scale (for example, mapping risks and vulnerability in an alpine context), the course illustrates how the use of interactive coding notebooks, a dedicated software library, and open-access datasets can be integrated to study the Earth.
Learning Objective
This course enables students to learn new ways to explore, process, analyze, and visualize geological and environmental geospatial data.
Course Structure
Exercise 1: Evolution of the Earth in deep-time
This exercise introduces students to geological modelling in GIS through a progressive, research-style exploration of Earth’s deep-time evolution using the Palaeo Data Cube. Starting with paleogeographic reconstructions, students analyze how land–ocean distribution changed from 100 Ma to the entire Phanerozoic by loading GeoTIFF rasters, computing global statistics, and visualizing maps and time series in Python. The course then expands to test geodynamic hypotheses by integrating seafloor age, crustal thickness, and lithospheric thickness datasets to examine how these layers are linked. Finally, students explore climate data (temperature, precipitation) and generate climate zone maps. Across all exercises, students develop core GIS and coding skills, learn to automate multi-dataset workflows, and interpret how tectonics, climate, and surface processes interact to shape Earth systems over hundreds of millions of years.
Exercise 2: Landslide risk assessement in an Alpine context
The second exercise focuses on a regional-scale application in the Swiss Alps, where students assess landslide susceptibility using GIS-based spatial analysis. By integrating high-resolution digital elevation models with geological maps and other relevant spatial layers, students evaluate how topography and geological conditions control slope instability. The exercise emphasizes practical risk assessment methods, including terrain analysis and multi-layer overlay, to identify areas most prone to landslides in an Alpine environment.
More information
SPACE-GEOLOGY is a 3 ECTS course given by the University of Geneva, as part of the Complementary Certificate of Geomatics, the Master in Environmental Sciences, and the Master in Earth Sciences.
This course is being updated and made fully open thanks to support from UNIGE’s Open Research Data call for projects, as part of the Palaeo Data Cube project.
For questions, please write to florian.franziskakis@unige.ch