• Question: what is the craziest/ most unexpected outcome you have had?

    Asked by faux520cove on 20 Jul 2025.
    • Photo: Julie Willecomme

      Julie Willecomme answered on 20 Jul 2025:

      I’m not sure it’s crazy but becoming a science communicator after years in the lab as a bench scientist was something I did not think would happen.
      Although I still work in science, I never thought I’d completely change career…
      And there’s still plenty of time to make more changes!

    • Photo: Jonathan Mound

      Jonathan Mound answered on 21 Jul 2025:

      I once gave an informal talk to a colleague’s research group about the technical and theoretical details of a set of numerical models we had run to simulate the flow of the liquid iron in Earth’s outer core. That colleague noticed a bump in one of the plotted lines and asked what it meant. It was something that I had seen but because I had been so focused on the technical details of how to analyse the data, I hadn’t yet thought about the implications of that analysis. Since then, I have spent years trying to figure out whether that bump represents something that can happen in the Earth. If it does, then there are continent sized regions at the top of Earth’s core where the fluid is hot and stagnant and not easily mixed back into the rest of the core.

      I don’t think that is crazy, but I certainly didn’t expect one question from a colleague about a bump on a line graph to spark a research project involving half a dozen people lasting for close to 10 years.

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