If you study ‘Earth Sciences’ at the University of Jena, you will often swap lecture theatres for the great outdoors, where you will need a great deal of perseverance, curiosity and thoroughness to become a real Sherlock Holmes of our home planet. Your detective work will be required to document minute structures and fossils in rocks and examine their composition under the microscope or in the laboratory. By piecing together all these fragments of information, you will gather plenty of evidence that will ultimately lead to a result. And you might even manage to solve the case and ask yourself the crucial questions of life: How can we preserve the beauty and diversity of our planet? And how can we repair the damage caused by mankind?