Do you have a good atlas? It might help you understand just how far scientists working at the University of California, San Diego, in La Jolla will be traveling when they conduct field research this summer.
Economist Jia Ruixue travels around China.
Fiamma Straneo, an oceanographer at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UCSD, is heading into the icy waters of the North Atlantic, off the coast of Greenland.
Jia plans to make use of China's high-speed rail network to travel between big cities, small towns and remote villages, offering a fresh look at what's happening economically and culturally in the world's second-most populous country.
She will pay particular attention to how the industry is dealing with worker shortages.
“Young people don't want to work in factories anymore. They find it boring,” said Jia, who studies the political and historical context in which companies change, particularly the adoption of new technologies. “I will ask companies if they will use more machines, including robots.”
She also plans to engage in general conversations with ordinary people about their daily lives while avoiding sensitive political topics, which Jia, who is Chinese, said she hopes will be a lighter topic of the trip.
She will also be stopping by music festivals to interact with young people.
“Slogans about feminism and LGBT [otherwise] “No one talks about taboo topics in public,” Jia said, “but young people express themselves in subcultures.”
Fiamma Straneo of the UCSD Scripps Institution of Oceanography will be conducting research off the coast of Greenland this summer.
(Alex Rivest)
In Greenland, Straneo hopes to collect baseline data on ocean temperature, salinity, and other aspects of the ocean off the northwest coast of the island, helping to shed light on what's happening as the planet warms.
The job is dangerous and will put her aboard a research vessel that slowly weaves between sea ice and glaciers.
Still, she said, “we think some of the ocean warming is filtering down to the glaciers, and that's one of the reasons why the ice sheet is losing ice.”
“One of the goals is to get as close as possible to the glacier,” Straneo said, “but there's always a balance between advancing science and ensuring safety.”
