Marlene is your drilling engineer role model. Other than tramping through rivers in gumboots, she squashes and blows up rocks to understand how strong they are. Before working at the University of Canterbury, she worked as a tunnelling engineer all over the world helping to design and build giant tunnels in rock. Her favourite part of her job is to travel to cool places to collect neat rocks so that she can figure out how strong they are for building things like tunnels and geothermal power plants and for understanding how volcanoes explode. One memorable job was when she worked on a big team that designed a 15 metre wide, 10 metre high tunnel under the city of Brisbane, Australia. It was absolutely gigantic and the design made sure that the tunnel was stable for five lanes of motorway traffic. Outside of work, Marlene loves, loves, loves rock climbing, which is great because she gets to spend lots of time climbing on rocks when she’s working too!
Resources:
Introducing the game
- Introduction video – part 1 – YouTube video
- Introduction video – part 2 – YouTube video
Mission 1 – Drilling for geothermal energy
- Drilling engineer 1970s – YouTube video
- Geothermal Drillers Save Planet Earth: Drilling engineer – PDF
- Geothermal Drillers Save Planet Earth drilling location – game map
Mission 2 – Energy from magma
- Introduction to the future – 2030s – YouTube video
- Drilling engineer 2030s – YouTube video
- Magma Drillers Save Planet Earth: Drilling engineer – PDF
- Magma Drillers Save Planet Earth drilling location – game map
Text courtesy of Magma Drillers Save Planet Earth
Image drawn by Elizabeth Mordensky
