• Question: If you were given 1,000,000 pounds to help with an investigation on anything what would it be ?

    Asked by ellievines to Davie, Gemma, James P, James V, Nuala on 27 Jun 2012.
    • Photo: James Verdon

      James Verdon answered on 27 Jun 2012:

      Hi ellievines,

      We often are. A million pounds isn’t that large for a research grant. That would fund maybe a couple of scientists to work on a particular problem. I was recently awarded £300,000 over 3 years to study how to measure and model stress in the earth’s crust.

      I should add that the £300,000 isn’t for me to spend on beer and fast cars. Most of that is for travel, equipment, computers and things. Only a third is for my salary, spread over 3 years

      Good, top end science is often very expensive. The Large hadron Collider at CERN must cost billions. So if you become a scientist, you might get to play with some pretty expensive toys!

    • Photo: Nuala Carson

      Nuala Carson answered on 27 Jun 2012:

      Hey ellievines,

      Yes as James said even though 1,000,000 pounds seems like a lot of money for research its actually not that much! Once you consider paying wages for staff, research expeditions, equipment it disappears very quickly.

      If i was given money to study anything it would probably be to do with sea ice thickness changes. A new satellite has just been launched that is going to take measurements of how thick the ice is in the Arctic and Antarctic. This will allow us to work out exactly how fast it is melting. i would like to help work on that. I would definitely have to factor in a trip to ate Arctic aswell!

    • Photo: James Pope

      James Pope answered on 27 Jun 2012:

      Hi ellievines,

      As James V and Nuala have said, (and it sounds completely crazy doesn’t it!) £1,000,000 isn’t a huge amount of money for research. If I was awarded a £1,000,000 grant, I would look to put together a team of me, two other scientists of my level and a PhD student and I would look at constructing a version of the more advanced Earth System Models (these are the step up from the climate model I presently use) that could run at the speeds that mean I could do the work I am doing now with this new model.

      The reason I don’t use an Earth System Model now is that I can only run 2 model years every real world day, whereas I can run 25 model years every real world day on the climate model. When each experiment you do lasts 1000 model years, that difference is massive. So if I could design this new model, it would allow me to do even more detailed work in the past, so that I could get an even better idea of how the climate of the Earth works!

      I’d also need a section of this money to spend on cake, biscuits and coffee as these are what makes science run! 😉

      A really great question though!

Comments