• Question: have you ever been somewhere in the view of gaining data and not finding it?

    Asked by alice14 to Davie, Gemma, James P, James V, Nuala on 25 Jun 2012.
    • Photo: James Verdon

      James Verdon answered on 25 Jun 2012:

      We sometimes get bad data back from the field. If a seismometer has not been installed very well, or maybe installed near something noisy like a road with trucks going past, then the data that comes back is mainly just noise, and no signals to analyse. Also, sometimes they break and they just don’t collect any data. When these things happen there’s not much you can do. But usually, we put out lots of seismometers, so even if one doesn’t work, at least most of them will have data we can use.

    • Photo: James Pope

      James Pope answered on 25 Jun 2012:

      Hi Alice14,

      When I was an undergraduate we were on a field trip to a loch in near Oban in Scotland and we were trying to analyse sediments from the bottom of the lake, which due to the conditions of the lake had no oxygen near them (called anoxia). We kept trying to get a core of this sediment and get it back to the boat before the oxygen got in. We thought we had to do this, but when we got back to the lab to analyse the data, all the results showed oxygen had got into the sediment.

      It was really frustrating, but thankfully this fieldtrip was more about teaching us the techniques and less about the actual data as it has been done many times before, so it didn’t cause me any major problems!

      In my climate modelling which I work on now, I do all my work from my desk, so I don’t go anywhere to get the data, but every now and again I can’t get the model to work and I’m not always sure why that is. I just have to work hard at it to try and find out what is wrong!

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