How to become a climate scientist

Dr Mike Williams from NIWA explains what areas you need to be good at if you want to study climates and the Antarctic environment.

Transcript

If you want to study -- study icebergs or climate or sea ice, it’s bad news if you don’t like maths or physics. The reality is that climate is part of physics, and you need a high level of maths in it. And that’s the background you need if you want to move in that direction.

The great thing about these areas is that you don’t actually have to spend your life sitting in a lab fiddling around with little bits of equipment. So even if you find that side of physics and maths frustrating, there are still great big problems you can work on, and ways the work that you can do can contribute to society, like working on climate change issues and things like that.