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Jezabel Curbelo, mathematician: "We worked very hard to answer a very small and very specific question"

2022-03-31T04:12:45.638Z


The young Spanish scientist accumulates awards for her research on what happens inside the Earth. "The Earth's mantle is a fluid, and I study the process that makes that fluid move"


Jezabel Curbelo (Los Realejos, Tenerife, 1987) is a scientist and professor at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya and member of IMTech (Institute of Mathematics of UPC-BarcelonaTech), considered one of the young mathematical promises of Spain.

She is a Donald L. Turcotte Award from the American Geophysical Union (AGU) for her doctoral thesis on nonlinear geophysics.

She has also won the Vincent Caselles award from the BBVA Foundation for the study of mathematical models of geophysics, the Antonio Valle award from the Spanish Society of Applied Mathematics for young researcher and the L'Oreal-UNESCO award for Women in Science.

Ask.

"Mathematics invites us to think about the enigmas of the interior of the Earth", she has said.

Answer.

They play a fundamental role in explaining how the Earth works.

We work with a set of complex equations that simulate the behavior of different processes in it.

They allow us to extract useful information from available data and, together with simulations and models, help us to study how the oceans move, how the atmosphere changes during climatic processes or to understand how the magma behaves inside the planet.

Q.

For example.

R.

_

To try to predict the climate we need to make models, forecasts and handle large amounts of data.

All these techniques have a solid mathematical and statistical basis.

Mathematical models are based on partial derivative equations that are solved using numerical methods.

The data is analyzed, filtered, assimilated, statistical diagnostic techniques, time series... Mathematical simulations allow us to represent different scenarios to estimate the consequences of very specific actions.

Q.

You study what happens inside the Earth, an inaccessible place.

R.

And outside: the oceans and the atmosphere.

We really study the movement of fluids.

In the case of the interior of the Earth, we only see what happens on the surface because we cannot go down there to take measurements or data.

So we have to use different techniques, such as inverse problems or numerical simulations, which help us to know what happens inside.

Q.

Inverse problems.

A.

You have the result and you want to know what problem caused it.

I am not a specialist in them, but the inverse problems are based on reconstructing the model from a set of measurements on the surface;

that is, to find the causes that have given rise to our observations.

My study of the Earth's interior focuses more on convection models.

Q.

What are…

R.

Let us think of a cauldron with water on the fire.

The water in contact with the bottom heats up and rises but when it reaches the surface it cools and descends, thus creating a convective circulation.

On Earth, the process is similar.

The core is hot, the surface is cold.

Convection currents cause heat to be transported from the interior to the surface.

We study mantle convection by working with a set of equations that model fluid behavior (on geological time scales, the mantle is a fluid).

My research is based on studying how fluids move, the processes that make a fluid move.

P.

The prediction of natural catastrophes.

R.

The most complicated part of all.

To predict something we must first understand it.

Our investigations try to know first why different phenomena occur and then try to say something more about them.

We are having extraordinary events in the atmosphere and it seems, although it is difficult to say for sure, that they are now a little more frequent.

P.

As in the earthquake of La Palma?

R.

That example was incredible.

Scientists were quite successful in anticipating the time of the eruption. Why?

A series of earthquakes the previous weeks, the increase in earthquakes near the surface, ground deformation... The data collected followed certain known patterns that announced the eruption and allowed it to be predicted.

Q.

In your postdoctoral work you addressed a mathematical investigation on the origin of the planet.

R.

The laboratory that hired me had the objective of studying the origins of the world from different perspectives.

In my case, from a geophysical point of view, not human or biological evolution.

In the end, in scientific research, you often work very, very hard to try to answer a very small and very specific question.

And my question was to try to know what role compressibility plays in the convection of the Earth's mantle.

Q.

And now what are you working on?

A.

One of the latest works we have is on the atmosphere of the northern hemisphere during the spring of 2020, an event that broke records in ozone depletion in that hemisphere accompanied by very low temperatures.

During that spring, the polar vortex broke in two and with it the ozone-poor air mass.

In our work we try to explain what geometric structures led the vortex to break in two and how was the distribution of the air mass in that division.

Q.

Does the planet convulse?

A.

Australia's 2019-2020 bushfire season has been its most intense yet and the plume of smoke from carbon dioxide emissions reached record heights in the stratosphere.

Here we analyze the evolution of the smoke plume through the study of trajectories and the search for geometric structures that guide its transport in the atmosphere.

We are having extraordinary events in the atmosphere and it seems, although it is difficult to say for sure, that they are now a little more frequent.

Q.

Your thesis was on nonlinear geophysics.

A.

Study the planet Earth from the perspective of the physical processes that occur on it.

By nature, these processes are mostly non-linear, which means that the effects or results are not proportional to the initial data or cause that generated them.

And therefore, the equations that model these processes cannot be linear either.

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Source: elparis

All news articles on 2022-03-31

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