What does the daily work life of a climate researcher look like? From field to desk, the human input behind the production of ICOS data is considerable but often little known. With the campaign #ResearchersAtWork, ICOS researchers are encouraged to highlight their everyday tasks via the ICOS social media accounts.
The everyday reality of greenhouse gas research is far from monotonous: daily workplaces might vary from the summit of a snowy mountain in Switzerland to the windy deck of a ship in the Barents Sea or a tiny platform of a 65 meters-high measuring tower in the middle of a German spruce forest. Daily tasks can range from installing a new measuring instrument in a mosquito-infested bog to painstakingly manually checking the week’s data harvest on a computer in an overheated small office crammed with instruments.
With #ResearchersAtWork, ICOS wants to provide any researcher part of our network the opportunity to showcase their everyday work on social media platforms to a large audience. The aim is to make climate-related science more accessible and more concrete to the general public. This “self-generated” content may be very diverse: it could be an amazing photo of a landscape, an instrument in use, a group portrait in an office, a screenshot of lines of Python code, or even an image of a researcher’s arms eaten by mosquitoes after a day in the field. All the images should be accompanied by a very short, descriptive text.
The submission process is pretty simple: researchers working at a station in the ICOS network are encouraged to use their phones to film or photograph parts of their day: it can be beautiful, it can be informative, it can be humorous… or all of the above. The author should write a few words to give a bit of context for their images and send everything to the ICOS Communication team (email below). After a quick review, the content will be posted on ICOS Instagram and Twitter accounts.
For more info, tips and recommendations, follow our guidelines.
Questions or requests can be sent directly to the ICOS Communications team icos-comms@icos-ri.eu
Cover photo: the Belgian ship of opportunity and ICOS Ocean station "Simon Stevin" / image by Konsta Punkka