Marine labs on rising water’s edge

COCODRIE, La. - The W.J. DeFelice Marine Center laboratory, some 85 miles SW of New Orleans in south Terrebonne Parish, was designed to be a fortress, but may be overrun in the future by rising seas and climate changes. Sitting at the end of Hwy. 56, where dirt meets wetlands and the Gulf of Mexico, the marine lab has weathered many storms since 1986. It stands 18 feet above ground pillars that extend more than 100 feet underground. Its walls can withstand winds of up to 250 mph. But the fear is that water is coming. Around the country, from New Jersey to Massachusetts, Virginia to Oregon, education centers and marine labs are bracing for rising seas and a changing climate. Those seas threaten researchers’ ability to study marine environments close up when it’s vital to understand. Bob Cowen, head of the National Association of Marine Laboratories, sees climate as a challenge, but a scientific opportunity. “We’re feeling it … (and) studying it at the same time,” he said. If labs like Cocodrie have to shut down, decades of measurements could be disrupted; and, research budgets may not allow replacements on a comparable scale. The Cocodrie center, the heart of the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium of more than a dozen institutions, was once high and dry. It now floods several dozen times a year. The corrosive saltwater attacks the structure and has risen through the soil into buried electrical cables causing at least one blackout. Some floods are accompanied by fiddler crabs that have found their way into elevators. “It was built to be on the edge of the world,” said Ursula Emery McClure, senior project designer with Perkins & Will and a longtime architectural researcher at the marine center, but not in open water. Murt Conover, associate director of education and outreach, sees the possibility of environmental education losses to some 5,000 students, who come through the facility annually. She also says “nature gives us the content we need to teach” and fiddler crabs are gross, “but awesome in their grossness.” ... “We very much feel like we have to be in Cocodrie,” Dr. Kolker said. “We’re marine scientists. We study the ocean.” (Source: NY Times 01/07/20) https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/07/climate/climate-change-marine-science.html?algo=top_conversion&fellback=false&imp_id=36121714&imp_id=822796339&action=click&module=trending&pgtype=Article&region=Footer