Teresa Eileen Jordan

Teaching Interests

Jordan's formal teaching responsibilities at Cornell are in the field of stratigraphy, the history of earth's surface environment, the characteristics of sedimentary rocks, and the geology of energy resources. She has helped develop a graduate level interdisciplinary curriculum focused on technologies to develop new energy sources from Earth's subsurface, which combines engineering and earth sciences.

Service Interests

Jordan's service centers on earth literacy, energy literacy, and sustainability. It is her philosophy that we must develop more sustainable manners of modern human activity, but that this will only be possible if hidden-from-view Earth materials and slow-acting Earth systems are understood in concert with more visible and faster-acting ecological trends, human needs and behavior. She is dedicated to encouraging exchanges of knowledge, perspectives, and goals between the peoples of South America and North America, as illustrated by her service during 2012 as a Fulbright Scholar in Chile. These goals have led her to undertake collaborative research into the potential for New York, Pennsylvania and West Virginia to produce geothermal energy and/or to mitigate carbon dioxide emissions through geological carbon sequestration. It also leads her to collaborate in examination of natural water systems of northern Chile. This philosophy also led her to gain experience with the geology of gas-rich shale, around which there is considerable activity and debate in which natural resource, environmental quality, climate change, and human behavior all merge or collide. Participation in the Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future and the Energy Institute facilitate investing her geological and paleoclimate knowledge in the search for more sustainable technologies and actions.