• Question: What are you favourite topics to investigate?

    Asked by hannahisawesome to Davie, Gemma, James P, James V, Nuala on 24 Jun 2012. This question was also asked by sawsage, russia, jade97, paigicles, cloclo.
    • Photo: James Pope

      James Pope answered on 24 Jun 2012:

      Hi hannahisawesome and sawsage,

      A great question. Well firstly I have to say the past climate of the Pliocene, the warmer climate period I study with my climate model, but I do really enjoy reading any new work in other periods of past climate. I also enjoy learning about the work people are doing to understand the modern day climate and to improve our climate models (so work by people like Nuala).

      But, I am still, very much a geologist at heart, I love getting out in the hills and looking at the rocks as I walk round and making guesses to myself of what they are and how they formed, I then like to go home and find out how I did (sometimes I’m right, sometimes I’m wrong).

      I also love the weather, I find it fascinating and one of my favoruite bits iof the week is the weather briefing we have in our department. My department has climate and weather scientists (meterologists), and every thursday we have Chatmosphere, where we review the last weeks weather and forecast the upcoming weather for the weekend. I can now read weather charts and get an idea of what teh weather will be like and I really enjoy that, especially as I like getting outdoors either hiking or (very importantly, weatherwise) playing cricket.

    • Photo: Nuala Carson

      Nuala Carson answered on 24 Jun 2012:

      Hey hannahisawsome and sawsage,

      I really love anything to do with polar science, so anything like sea ice, polar bears, penguins, glaciers. They are really interesting to look at and learn about, I think penguins are my favourite animals! I also think it’s really interesting that really small changes in the polar regions have a massive impact on the whole world, so I view them as the key to protecting the world form climate change.

    • Photo: James Verdon

      James Verdon answered on 24 Jun 2012:

      Hi guys,
      When I think about it, I guess all my work boils down to learning more about the state of stress in the crust. Stress describes how the movements of plate tectonics squeezes and deforms the earth’s crust. It controls when and where earthquakes happen, as well as having a strong effect on volcanic eruptions.

      Also, the stress state affects things like coal mining – with the wrong stress state cave-ins and accidents can occur – and oil reservoirs, where sucking the oil out can change the stress and cause problems.

      So to understand all of these things, I’m developing methods that allow us to measure the stress throughout the crust. It’s my favourite thing to investigate because if we can do this, we can understand about earthquake and volcanoes, as well as ensure safe extraction of the natural resources that we depend on.

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