Question: what research are you currently doing?

Natasha Dowey answered on 8 Mar 2019: last edited 13 Mar 2019 2:04 pm

I am currently creating a computer model of the Earth’s crust beneath part of the Middle East.
A model is where we try to recreate the real world inside a computer, so that we can play around with it and see what happens in different situations!
I am using some data to build it (data that has been collected from rocks brought up when holes have been drilled in the ground), and I am also using my knowledge of how that part of the world has changed through time to make predictions of what should be beneath the surface, and what conditions we can expect. For example, I know that this part of the world is currently being ripped apart by tectonic forces, and that these processes make the crust really hot in certain places. By putting this all into a computer, I can start to run tests of what I think has happened in this area over the last 150 million years, to understand if we might be able to find oil and gas there in the future.