People working on climate or energy give Carbon Brief a sense of their lives beyond the nine-to-five…
Dr Jason Box is a professor at the Glaciological Survey of Denmark and Greenland. With more than 23 expeditions to Greenland and a year spent living on the ice sheet, his work specialises in understanding how the Arctic is responding to weather and climate change. Box coordinates Dark Snow, a crowd-sourced project examining how wildfires and industrial soot are darkening the surface of the ice.
Book
Jason’s workings. Credit: Jason Box.
The Changing Atmosphere: A Global Challenge, 1990, by J. Firor. Here my career was launched seeing the Keeling curve and doing the math in the back cover (see right!) that in 1991 were at *350* ppm CO2. Now we’re another 50 ppm higher!
Place
Boulder, Colorado, (where I spent 12 years earning 5 degrees at University of Colorado), view up to mountains where geology and the atmosphere are on dramatic display.
Film
Repo Man – a satire of the modern world.
Activity
Skiing.
Jason Box (left) and Aberystwyth University PhD student Johnny Ryan with a drone used for Dark Snow Project survey work. It’s programmed to fly on long (up to 140 km) autonomous missions. This photo was taken in August 2014 on the western Greenland ice sheet. Credit: @DarkSnowProject.
Music
Right now it’s the album Atlas by Real Estate. A longer term favorite the UK audience will be more into is Spiritualized – Laser Guided Melodies.
Food
Mexican, check out the molé Amarillo at Red Iguana in Salt Lake City, Utah.
TV
Sanford and Son – hilarious 1970s TV sitcom.
Role model
Carl Sagan, David Attenborough, Albert Einstein.
Luxury
Scotch whisky.
Essential
Stable climate.
Jason Box flying over dark Greenland ice on 23 August 2014 as part of a maintenance tour of promice.org climate stations on the southern Greenland ice sheet. Higher on the ice sheet, the surface is not this dark. But down low, where the highest melt rates happen, this darkness amplifies absorbed sunlight, the dominant energy source for melt. Credit: Jason Box Dark Snow project.Main image: The Red Iguana, Salt Lake City.
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Jason Box on scotch whisky, Mexican food, Repo Man, and Boulder, Colorado... #CarbonBriefly
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Jason Box gives us a sense of his life beyond the nine-to-five... #CarbonBriefly