Last week we mentioned the relaunch of the Future
Morph website with its excellent careers advice
section. However, sometimes grabbing the attention of a class
full of 13 year olds is easier if you have something strange or
disgusting to show them.
Planet Science is here to help! Over the next few weeks we will
be profiling some science jobs you may never have encountered
before. Some are relatively normal, while others are
definitely not for the faint hearted.
These articles will also provide links to teaching
resources and ideas for classroom activities and experiments.
1. Marine palaeoclimatologist
Who doesn't like playing in the mud? If your students really
like getting their hands dirty then perhaps this is the job they
should choose.
Everyone has heard of tree
rings; those beautiful circles you find when a branch or trunk
has been sawn in two. Each pair of light and dark rings represents
one year of growth and the wider the rings, the more the tree grew
that year. Someone interested in how the Earth's climate has
changed through time (a palaeoclimatologist) can take tiny samples
of the tree from different rings and use them to find out things
like the temperature, how much rainfall there was and how much
CO2 there was in the atmosphere at the time.
Growth ring from of a tree at
Bristol Zoo, England (c) Arpingstone
Some people have also heard about ice cores from Greenland and
Antartica being used to investigate climate chage from tens to
hundreds of thousand years ago. Each layer in the great polar
ice caps contains information which can be used by scientists to
research past climates.
Less well known, however, is the work
of marine palaeoclimatologists who use mud collected from the bottom of
the ocean to find out about changes in the marine environment over
thousands and even millions of years.
The mud can be collected in a number
of ways, including using a gravity corer from
the deck of a research vessel. This equipment is basically a
long (up to 15 metres) metal tube with a large weight on the
end. It is carefully lowered of the deck of the ship until it
is about 30-50m for the seabed, then dropped.
Gravity corer being lowered into
the ocean (c) MBARI
When the corer is pulled slowly up to
the surface, the metal tube will be full of layered sediment ready
to be analyised with everything from your eyes and a sharp pencil
to X-rays.
The collect samples contain rocks,
sand and mud as well as large amounts of organic matter, mostly diatoms, foramnifera and other algae,
which has settled slowly through the water to the sea floor.
Like all living things, algae collect information about the
environment around them and store it in their bodies. For
example, looking at the different isotopes of carbon and oxygen in
algae cells can give a marine palaeoclimatologist an insight into
changes in sea-level, carbon dioxide levels, global temperatures
and the changing orbit of the Earth around the sun.
Scientists study sediment cores
(c) NASA
So why would your pupils be interested
in marine palaeoclimatology? Well, several reasons spring to
mind:
- Collecting them could mean going on research cruises to amazing
places like Antarctica, the Indian Ocean, the Mediterranean and Svalbard. Sadly it might
also mean collecting industrial waste from the mouths of rivers,
but it might be best not to mention that...
- The work can be exciting and dangerous. Working in the North
Atlantic and Southern Oceans means dealing with some of the worst
weather in the world with freezing temperatures and raging seas,
not to mention polar bears and leopard seals
- For children who like getting messy, the mud often stinks and
it's hard not to get covered in it
- Studying the sediments in the laboratory means dissolving it
with highly-dangerous chemicals and analysing it with
state-of-the-art instruments
- The work palaeoclimatologists do is vitally important in
increasing our understanding of how the Earth's climate system
works and how human activity may be affecting it
More weird and wonderful careers ideas will be coming soon to
Planet Science, so subscribe to
our newsletter and we can keep you posted.