Earth and Planetary Science, including Oceanography, is an example of a distributed model of Big Science with an extremely broad research focus. Education also covers a broad spectrum, from cultivating literacy in the understanding of the natural environment, to education in disaster prevention and mitigation, to education for leading edge research. Given the constraints in which national universities currently find themselves, the creation of a university education consortium is needed to take capacity development and research to the highest levels. Actually, in the field of Volcanology, a project to create a consortium for the field of Volcanology is already underway.