On a rainy spring morning in Cynwyd, Wales, a group of Penn State students and faculty gather in the local youth hostel, a coal fire burning in the small stove, to recount the stops on their energy tour of Iceland and the United Kingdom. Lara Owens, an undergraduate studying geosciences, begins by describing Icelandic hydroelectric and geothermal power plants that produce enough energy for the small nation, and the country's lone hydrogen-powered car—the first in a fleet, the government hopes—with its own fueling station.

Stanlow, England—While thundering along the highways in our diesel-powered van, I've been noticing fields of bright yellow-flowered plants, waving in the wind and glowing during those rare moments the sun comes out.

This May sixteen Penn State undergraduates and three faculty members spent two weeks traveling through Iceland and the United Kingdom. They stayed in youth hostels, ate at truckstops, rode for hours in large diesel-powered vans, and suffered through days and days of bone-chilling rain. Their mission: to chart the West's progress from 18th-century rural economy to the post-industrial economy of the 21st century, focusing on the significant role that energy resources have played in that transformation.

It's not an easy trek to Harlock Hill's wind farm: You have to drive several miles northwest of Ulverston on England's notorious back roads, barely wide enough for a bicycle. The roads are lined by four-foot stone walls, and surrounded by the vivid green foliage only possible in this country where it has rained every day for the last week and a half.

A curriculum that includes touring windmill farms in the UK? How about scaling New Zealand's Southern Alps, scuba diving in the Florida Keys, or camping along the Colorado River?

That's all in a day's work for students involved in the interdisciplinary courses sponsored by the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences' Center for Advanced Undergraduate Study and Experience (CAUSE).

The Center for Advanced Undergraduate Study and Experience (CAUSE) funds seminars that promise a "real world experience" for students—a chance to leave the classroom and textbooks behind and spend time seeking solutions to environmental problems in the field. The students in the CAUSE 2000 seminar traveled from Colorado to California to examine our energy choices for the new millennium. Their goal? To find "technological solutions" to global warming. By Gina Cancelliere.

The Red Sea, the Nile River, the Sinai Desert—you've probably seen images of these places on television, in a magazine, or in a textbook. And most likely, pictures will be the only way you’ll experience Egypt's richness. Not for the CAUSE 2001 class. Under the guidance of geophysicist Shelton Alexander, twenty-or-so students will spend a year studying Egypt's archeology, geology, and biology.