Penn team to research sea levels

Penn’s understanding of the ocean is about to get a lot deeper.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has awarded Benjamin Horton, a professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Science, a $1.5 million grant to improve the prediction of coastal flooding caused by hurricanes and sea-level rising.

The grant lasts for three years and focuses on six sites on the U.S. Atlantic coast — Georgia, North Carolina, New Jersey, Connecticut and the Atlantic and Gulf Coast of Florida. Through a combination of techniques the team hopes to help both scientists and coastal communities by providing more accurate predictions of sea levels — as well as more accurate hurricane preparation — in the future.

Currently it’s predicted that due to climate change, sea levels will rise anywhere from 20 centimeters to two meters — an untenable range for practical applications, explained Horton. Current predictions range “from something that we can adapt to, to something that would cause catastrophic changes in the way that we interact with our coastline,” Horton said. “We’re going to be the first people that are going to attempt” more accurate predictions of sea-level rise, he added.

Both undergraduate and graduate students at Penn play a crucial role in Horton’s research project. In fact, the background for the grant was based on work that Ph.D. recipient Andrew Kemp did as a Penn postdoctoral fellow last year.

Both Kendra McCoy and Jenny Gai, who graduated last year from the College of Arts and Sciences, also worked on collecting preliminary sea-level data for Horton. “Working on the research as an undergrad was really exciting,” said McCoy, who helped collect sea-level data in New Jersey. “I was a part of real science and real research.”

One unique part of the research is that Horton and his team will look at geological data — which extrapolates past sea levels by looking at rocks, soil and fossils — rather than relying solely on recorded observational data from the past 100 years. This extends the time frame back 1,000 to 2,000 years to “dramatically increase our understanding of the relationship between temperature and sea level,” he said.

“In order to understand what’s going on in the present, you really have to be able to put it into the context of the past,” added Gai, who collected the initial sea-level data in Georgia for her senior thesis.

In another part of the project, the data will be used to simulate hurricanes along the Atlantic coast. For example, they could simulate the destruction that Hurricane Irene would cause in the year 2050 given different scenarios of sea-level rise. “You’re doing something that is very relevant especially since we just had Irene,” Horton said. Given the huge amount of infrastructure on the East Coast, “you need to have better predictions so that people can better prepare.” For Gai, the societal implications of the study were what got her interested in the research. “I think this will ultimately change [government] policy,” she said.

Yet in the face of the current financial climate, Horton was uncertain whether or not he would receive the money due to the large amount of funding being cut from scientific organizations. “It’s quite strange when you’re doing work and you’re watching CSPAN to see what’s being said in Congress about what they’re going to do about the funding,” explained Horton. “There is, on the Republican side, this skepticism regarding climate change, so I was very concerned.”

It wasn’t until mid-August that Horton found out that the money was definitely secured. “It’s a very exciting project because when I came to Penn, I wrote in my application letter something like, ‘I would like to make the University of Pennsylvania the center of sea-level studies in the U.S.,’” Horton said. “And this grant puts us near that center.”

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