• Question: are you going to save any lives with your science? if so, how?

    Asked by wiki19065 to Davie, Gemma, James P, James V, Nuala on 25 Jun 2012. This question was also asked by winnie.
    • Photo: James Pope

      James Pope answered on 25 Jun 2012:

      Hi wiki19065

      My work won’t directly save any lives, but hopefully it will add to our understanding of the the Earth’s climate which will help us reduce the impacts of climate change which could cause people to die. So hopefully the community I am part of (along with Nuala) will save lives as one big team!

    • Photo: James Verdon

      James Verdon answered on 26 Jun 2012:

      Hi wiki,
      I don’t imagine I’m directly going to make any decisions that will save lives. However, maybe some of the ideas we are developing could be used by someone that will. For example, some of our work aims to determine stress conditions in the rocks of the earth’s crust. This could be used to help stop cave-ins and collapses at mines.

      Do you remember the cave-in and those trapped miners in Chile? Mine collapses kill people every year. If mine operators have betters ways of working out the stress conditions as they dig, they can identify areas at risk of cave-in, and do something to stop it, which could save lives. The work I’m doing might help them to do this.

      Often in science, your work might only be a smaller part of a larger effort involving lots of scientists all over the world. The larger body of work may be contributing to saving lives. Your part might not directly help to save lives, but you are helping to contribute to something that can. And that’s still good to know.

      If you’re really keen on doing a job where you can directly influence a lot of lives, I’d recommend looking into medical science. In this field, and advances you make will be directly useful to saving people with diseases (like new cures for cancer, or treatments for AIDS, for example).

    • Photo: Davie Galloway

      Davie Galloway answered on 27 Jun 2012:

      hi wiki19065,

      whilst working in montserrat (in the caribbean) on the soufriere hills volcano we had to evacuate the south of the island (where most of the population lived) when we started to see lots and lots of earthquakes on our seismometers (instruments that detect any ground vibrations) which were placed around the volcano … the day after we evacuated the people there was a huge pyroclastic flow that covered the south of the island in ash and rocks … i’m sure if there had been no evacuation then lots of lives would have been lost … btw that was a very scary time for me

    • Photo: Gemma Purser

      Gemma Purser answered on 29 Jun 2012:

      Hi wiki19065,

      I suppose you could say that if we start to perform carbon capture and storage on a large scale that it could help to prevent the worst predictions of global warming being realised and so save lives. The worst case scenario could see extreme weather events like droughts and floods that could kill thousands of people. Carbon capture and storage would buy us more time to think about cleaner but also effective and efficient ways of producing energy to meet our ever increasing demands. Like James P and Nuala build and run computer models based on data that someone has collected. I am the person who carries out the experiments that generate the data for people to build models with in terms of carbon storage underground.

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