Some of Australia’s most prominent researchers nominate the most surprising, important and inspiring scientific developments of the past 12 months
So for me, this year’s most exciting advance is not a discovery but solid investment in future Antarctic science, heralded by the arrival of Australia’s new icebreaker, RSV Nuyina, the most advanced polar research vessel in the world, and the initiation of not one, but three new university-based Antarctic research initiatives.
This was then overlaid by the politics, to an extraordinary extent not seen before. Everyone was blaming each other for causing the pandemic, often to cover their own poor pandemic responses. This has led to secretiveness and suspicion, delay and obfuscation, denial and accusation. An investigation into the origins of a disease is core scientific and medical business – politics has made this an almost impossible task and has been depressingly ‘anti-science’.
In a year when I’ve barely managed to leave my house, the ability to have helicopter flights on Mars seems even more like science fiction than it normally would.”Professor of ocean and climate dynamics at the University of New South Wales, and co-founder of UNSW’s Climate Change Research Centrerelating to ocean conditions around the West Antarctic Ice Sheet , which locks up in total about seven metres of global sea level.
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