Science Daily: The anticipated sea-level rise associated with climate change, including increased storminess, over the next 100 years and the impact on the nation’s low-lying coastal infrastructure is the focus of a new, interdisciplinary study led by geologists at The Florida State University.“Our hypothesis is that the historic storm record, which extends back only about 150 years, isn’t a reliable indicator of true storm frequency, but the long-term geologic record is,” said Joseph F. Donoghue, an associate professor of geology at Florida State University and the study’s lead investigator. “This project is crucial because the rates of change in environmental parameters predicted for the near future are much greater than those of the past several millennia. For example, some of the worst-case sea-level rise scenarios predicted for the near future have not been experienced by the coastal system for more than 8,000 years.”
Funding for the research comes from a three-year, $1.03 million grant from the Strategic Environmental Research and Development Program (SERDP), an environmental science and technology initiative headed by the U.S. Department of Defense and administered in partnership with the Department of Energy and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
By 2012, the study is expected to produce methodologies and models that help coastal planners and managers in all low-lying coastal regions better understand, address and mitigate the near-future effects of sea-level rise -- an especially critical issue for the Sunshine State. The research team will perform its field work along the Gulf of Mexico coast in Northwest Florida, a region of the Florida Panhandle distinguished by rare coastal lakes, which harbor sediments that form an environmental record dating back thousands of years….
A US soldier ankle-deep in New Orleans after Katrina
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