Scott Elliott

The Burning Ice: Will Methane Hydrate Destabilization Surprise Climate Scientists?
 

Scott Elliott of the Los Alamos ocean model team has had an obscure and checkered scientific career driven mainly by his desire to remain married to the same woman while simultaneously living in the Rocky Mountains. This has confined his professional opportunities largely to projects undertaken by remote and mysterious Los Alamos National Laboratory. The Lab is located deep in the Jemez range of Northern New Mexico and this is as close as he could get to UNM, the institution where his wife works as a biology professor. Elliott and this lovely lady have two smart, wonderful kids now moving through high school. They are a great joy to him, but basically they haven't got the slightest interest in what he does for a living. He nevertheless clings to the notion that his work is important and fascinating, and hopes perhaps that some of the Café participants will agree.
 
Since coming to Los Alamos, Elliott has sometimes been assigned to projects which are heavily defense or national security-oriented. He always participates with a smile and this goes to show what a flexible guy he is. Examples include the study of nerve agent release into city air following the Tokyo subway Aum Shinrikyo incident, or satellite detection of North Korean missile launches. But Elliott's heart is really in global change, and he is thus extremely thankful now to be working on the very topical and relevant issues presented by climate modeling. His original training is in chemistry but since joining the Los Alamos ocean simulation team he has become a self-taught, seat of the pants biologist as well. He performs research on geological scale cycling of the elements using these skills and hence can be termed a "biogeochemist". In his current job description Elliott is almost entirely unique. He is one of only two people in the world currently performing marine biology simulations at a nuclear weapons laboratory, and to make matters worse it is located on top of a mountain, in the middle of the desert, a thousand miles from the nearest body of water larger than a bathtub. Clearly Elliott's career to date has been somewhat nonstandard. But his colleagues on the Los Alamos ocean model team are so good that he is nevertheless quite productive and has a tremendous amount of fun.
 
Although he has no real oceanographic training, Elliott is proud to note that he has spent significantly more time in seawater over the course of his life than any of the formally educated specialists he interacts with on a professional basis. This is because when he was young, he happened to be a dedicated surfer and body surfer (dude!). To become proficient at these sports you have to spend many hours every day up to your neck in the ocean, summer after summer from the time you learn to swim until you go to college and get serious about life. Encounters with jelly fish, porpoises and whales are not uncommon, hence Elliott's fondness for the marine biology. You look down under your chin beneath the warm California sun and see lots of sparkly little dust particles whirling about mixed with chunks of bizarre green goo. So there's the geochemistry. Take that, oceanography snobs.