Collaboration does not just occur between scientists of the same institution or the same country. Research is often conducted by international teams, where each team brings specialist knowledge to the project. For example the research project that Dr Megan Balk is part of involved Italian drilling specialists to drill deep holes. Without their expertise and input Megan would not have been able to measure the same variety of data that she did.
Points of interest for the teachers:
- Why is international collaboration good?
Transcript
DR MEGAN BALKS
By bringing in international collaboration we bring in real strength. For instance the work we did with the Italians, they came in with a whole lot of drilling equipment that we don’t have access to and so allowed us to get some bore holes in that we can measure temperatures into the permafrost much deeper than we would have been able to within our resources. The opportunities to work with people from other parts of the world and for them to work with us, brings huge increases in, in understanding and that’s, that’s good for the planet – that’s good for the population of the world. With my Antarctic work it’s not only the people I work with in the field but you also need to be talking to other researchers in the same area and for me that’s people who are studying permafrost’s and cold soils and they are people, often, from the Northern hemisphere who are doing work in the Arctic. So I have a number of people that I communicate with very regularly in Russia, in Scandinavia, Northern Canada. You know there’s, there’s a whole range of people all around the world and so you have these wonderful opportunities to be travelling to meet with some of those people to work with and so on.
