Careers: Measuring greenhouse gases – from icicles to cows

Trips to Antarctica or to local farmyards are all in a day's work for research scientist Dominic Ferretti. What do icicles and cows have in common?

Transcript

Dominic Ferretti (NIWA)

The work I am currently doing for NIWA is kind of two fold. One, I am working on icicles, developing capability to actually measure greenhouse gases of icicles ourselves, which hasn’t really been done previously in New Zealand. That is at one end of the spectrum. The other end of the spectrum is on agricultural greenhouse gas emissions, which involves things like going out into the field measuring emissions from farm animals: sheep, cows, paddocks, developing the gear to do it, and carrying out the research, looking at the data, and analysing it.

I chose this career path in science, because it’s…. I guess it’s, something I am interested in, and it’s a good mix between practical hands-on and getting out in the field, doing interesting field experiments, and great field trips to places like Antarctica. Also, it’s quite an interesting, developing field of research that’s quite topical at the moment with climate change. It’s something that is on everyone’s minds and has got pretty important consequences for the future.