I’m Alice, I’m italian, but I’ve been living in the UK for the last couple of years. I lived in Southampton (where the Titanic left from!) for about a year when I was doing my masters degree and at the moment I’m based in Bristol, a really fun and active city in the South-West of England. It’s a great place to live if you manage to forget about all the rain! Here I’m doing a PhD in the School of Geographical Sciences, studying the dynamics of climate.
I am a numerical modeller, which means that I spend most of my time working on computer simulations. The models I use can’t work on normal PCs, but only on huge machines that are as big as a room! The one that I am using at the moment is called “Blue Crystal” and it is seriously big (see picture below). These models are very powerful and can simulate the activity of the ocean, atmosphere and vegetation, sometimes also ice sheets, all at the same time and everywhere in the world. Unfortunately it takes a long time to run these complex simulations.
This is BlueCrystal (also called BigBlue…can you guess why?!)

For my PhD I am particularly interested in the climate during the “late Miocene”, a geological time period between about 11 and 5 million years ago (dinosaurs were already extinct, but humans were not there yet). We think that at this time the Earth was wetter and warmer than it is today, and a catastrophic event called the “Messinian Salinity Crisis” occurred in the Mediterranean Sea. The water exchange between the Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean (which today happens via the Strait of Gibraltar) was limited and therefore most of the Mediterranean water evaporated, leaving lots of salt deposits behind. Today we can still find about 1.5 km of that salt which was deposited during the late Miocene laying under the Mediterranean Sea!
So this is a very interesting time period to explore and I also study monsoon systems, especially the North African one, and compare the differences and similarities between the late Miocene and present-day. In fact, most of the freshwater going into the Mediterranean Sea comes from the North African rivers (especially the Nile) and when the monsoon is strong there is obviously a lot more water flowing through these rivers. In particular, I study how the monsoon changes in relation to orbital parameters, those that regulate the movement of the Earth around the Sun.
But that’s not all…
I am also very lucky because I get the chance to go and see the things that I model with my computer simulations in real life! I have been on a research cruise in the subpolar North Atlantic (we were between Iceland and Scotland) to study how ocean currents change year after year in those regions. Did you know that the water exiting the Mediterranean Sea can sometimes travel that far north?!
I have also been on fieldwork, especially in Spain and Morocco, where we can still find traces of some of the events that happened in the late Miocene. This can help us understand what was going on during the Messinian Salinity Crisis. However, this event is still a bit of a mystery, so we have a lot more work to do on it!
Finally, my job is to combine the data that me and my colleagues collect in the field and compare it to my computer simulations. Or sometimes I specifically create simulations to try and understand the things we see in the field.
This is the most exciting part of it! The collaboration between scientists with different expertise and backgrounds is always very interesting and rewarding.

AT THE OFFICE:

A “standard” day means that I am at my office in Bristol (which I share with 25 more people – a bit like a classroom!) and I am most likely working on my computer, either running simulations or analysing the results that the model has created over the last few weeks (yes, that’s how long it takes for the simulations to run). Otherwise I might be trying to write a scientific paper or helping out with the teaching going on in my University (especially in the computer labs), or discussing my results with my supervisors (professors). If not, you might find me in the common room with my colleagues drinking tea (we’re in England after all!).

COURSES AND CONFERENCES:

I am not always in Bristol, though. I am very lucky to be part of a very exciting project which gave me the chance to attended a lot of courses hosted by other universities or industrial companies during my PhD to specialise in other disciplines other than just numerical modelling. I also often go to conferences, both in the UK and abroad. For example, in the last two years I have been to Belgium, France, Austria, Turkey, Hawaii (!!)…or my last trip was to San Francisco, just before Christmas.

FIELDWORK:

I have also spent quite some time in the field, learning more and more about geology, so there have been weeks when a “standard” day meant that we were climbing a mountain, hammering rocks, drawing pictures of what we see and taking measurements. My favourite days were definitely the ones we spent in remote places in Morocco, where in the small local villages they never see tourists, just geologists! I’ve added some pictures from our fieldtrips at the end.

This is me after learning how to log a geologic section in the field and feeling like a proper geologist! 😀

OCEANOGRAPHIC CRUISE:

When I was at sea on the research cruise a “standard” day meant waking up at 3.45 am (yes, every day!) because my first shift would start at 4 am and end at 8 am just before breakfast (when everybody else would wake up!). My other shift was 4-8 pm, so I normally had to catch up on sleep between the two and then go to bed early after dinner because another round would start early the morning after. During our working hours we would be sampling sea water by sending instruments deep down in the ocean, checking that all the scientific equipment around the ship was working fine, and analysing the data that we were collecting every day. In our spare time we were mainly trying to spot whales, watching beautiful sunsets over the ocean, watching a movie or reading a book in the library, or most likely drawing on polystyrene cups that we would then send to the bottom of the ocean together with the scientific instruments, to see them being shrunk by the incredibly high pressure that increases as you go deeper (this is the main hobby that scientists have on a research cruise!). See pictures of the cruise below.