Twins to translate science for laymen

Australian twins Imogen and Freya (holding globe) Wadlow will be attending the Stratosphere...
Australian twins Imogen and Freya (holding globe) Wadlow will be attending the Stratosphere-troposphere Process and their Role in Climate conference which begins tomorrow in Queenstown. Photo supplied.
Sydney twins Imogen and Freya Wadlow (18) have a busy week ahead of them.

The pair are aiming to decode climate scientists' language from a conference which begins in Queenstown tomorrow into something more understandable.

They were invited to attend the general assembly of the Stratosphere-troposphere Processes and their Role in Climate [Sparc] by Greg Bodeker, of Bodeker Scientific, who is based in Alexandra and co-chairman of the project.

The conference will discuss the upper atmosphere and its effect on climate.

Imogen Wadlow said at a conference in Canberra, they had talked to Dr Bodeker about whether scientific language was easily understood.

''What we want to achieve is to engage teenagers in science and get them excited and motivated about it,'' she said.

The pair have just finished their first year at Macquarie University, both studying a double degree in science and politics. Imogen is majoring in climate science.

''We met Greg ... at another geo-engineering conference in Canberra ... and he invited us to come over on a communications role to decode what the climate scientists were talking about - because it is very important ideas they will be talking about - and to communicate this in a way that's easier to understand and specifically target it towards teenagers.''

The twins have been co-funded by Macquarie University's Department of Environment and Geography and Sparc for the role.

After listening to lectures and interviewing climate scientists they will make short videos to put on YouTube, update social media and write articles for their websites planetpatrol.info, which they set up aged 10, and i-fink.com.

They will be focusing on lectures or topics ''we think will be exciting or relevant''.

Sparc was founded in 1992 and is one of the four core projects in the World Climate Research Programme. The conference's four key topics of climate variability and change, ozone, atmospheric chemistry and aerosols, and polar processes, are to be discussed over five and a-half days, concluding on Friday.

In 2012, Dr Bodeker told the Queenstown Times Sparc ''is all about how stratospheric processes affect climate and New Zealand is one of the countries strongly affected by this'' and that was a core reason why he sought a New Zealand location for the conference.

About 280 international and national scientists will be attending the conference.

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