• Question: what are you building in this moment ?

    Asked by cerf to Angus, Christian, Hannah, Laura, Simon on 20 Jun 2013.
    • Photo: Hannah Bentham

      Hannah Bentham answered on 20 Jun 2013:

      Building models of the Earth and comparing them to earthquake data.

      These are computer models though. Not models out of Lego or anything. I wish 🙂

    • Photo: Angus Ferraro

      Angus Ferraro answered on 20 Jun 2013:

      Like Hannah, I work with computer models. I use models of the atmosphere to study how air flows around the Earth. Sometimes you can learn things from real models though. In my department we have a water tank to do some basic experiments in. It’s useful because water and air actually behave quite similarly – they are both fluids!

    • Photo: Simon Holyoake

      Simon Holyoake answered on 20 Jun 2013:

      I’m building a remote controlled submarine to carry out acoustic inspection data on offshore wind turbines, a machine which smashes rocks with sledgehammers to measure how much energy they absorb, and writing software to fire miniature seismic waves through rock samples 🙂

    • Photo: Laura Roberts Artal

      Laura Roberts Artal answered on 20 Jun 2013:

      I don’t get to build anything as part of my work. I just spend a lot of time looking at data.
      In time, I hope to build what we call a continental reconstruction. I guess you know that the continents move around the surface of the planet due to plate tectonic? Well, I’m hoping to work out where South Africa was way back in the past. Once I find that out, I’ll build a map of it’s position using a fancy computer program that helps me with the maths!

    • Photo: Christian Maerz

      Christian Maerz answered on 20 Jun 2013:

      Not building anything, but squeezing water out of sediment samples from the sea floor. Pretty hard stuff by now, about 700 m below the sea floor.

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