• Question: What do you aim to achieve by exploring further this area of science?

    Asked by pommedeterre to James V, Davie, Gemma, James P, Nuala on 25 Jun 2012. This question was also asked by dearboy03.
    • Photo: James Verdon

      James Verdon answered on 25 Jun 2012:

      Hi pommedeterre,
      My real aims are to develop ways to work out what the stress is in the earth’s crust. Stress is really important in so many ways. Stress on faults is what causes earthquakes. Stress conditions affect how volcanoes erupt. Stress is really important in mining, because if the stress is wrong you can get cave ins and accidents, and in oil and gas production as well.

      So if we can find ways to know what the stress is in advance, we’ll have a better idea of which faults are likely to have earthquakes, we can understand more about volcanic eruptions, and we can extract natural resources in a more safe way. So that’d really be what I hope to achieve in my work.

    • Photo: James Pope

      James Pope answered on 27 Jun 2012:

      Hi pommedeterre & dearboy3

      I aim to achieve a better understanding of a process known as “Climate Sensitivity”. Climate sensitivity is the amount of warming we will see for a doubling of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Presently the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimate it to be between 2°C and 4.5°C with a most likely value of 3°C. It is important we have a better idea of this value as it is important for how we model what climate change will mean for temperature in the future. If it is higher than 3°C or 4°C then we will see more warming and climate change will be worse than we presently think, but if it is lower, then climate change won’t be as bad.

      I make alterations to my model which produce a different range of climate sensitivity values in the model (from 2.1°C to 7.1°C) and I run the model to see what happens. Because I run it in a past warmer world, I can compare it to temperature data produced from formainifera, which are the remains of plankton, which in building their shells created a record of the temperature for us to find using chemistry on the shells! We can also do the same with fossilised pollen on land and I get a way of testing my results.

      My early work suggests the climate sensitivity is more like 4°C or possibly 5°C so I am continuing my research to improve this value.

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