When you think of sea level rise and NASA,
if that's the kind of thing you think about,
I feel like it's only natural to imagine scientists pouring over satellite data,
trying to better understand what's happening and what the future might look like
on our coasts,
including right here where I live in the Hampton roads area of Virginia. Uh,
my name is Joe Atkinson and I'm a science communicator at NASA's Langley
Research Center.
This area is one of the hot spots for sea level rise in the country.
Even on a beautiful, gorgeous, sunny day,
we can have nuisance flooding just because of a high tide,
but we'll get back to this area later. And specifically NASA Langley.
The thing is, even as scientists are studying sea level rise,
the agency itself is having to confront the reality of it.
It has field centers and coastal communities around the country.
I wanted to find out how seriously NASA is taking this threat.
So I got in touch with a guy whose job it is to worry about this kind of stuff.
Uh, his name is Calvin Williams and he is the associate administrator for NASA's
Office of Strategic Infrastructure.
First of all, I like to say, thank you, Joseph,
for the opportunity to speak to you about this.
Sea level rise is a very major concern for us. Uh,
we have about two thirds of our NASA facilities
are within 16 feet of sea level,
and that comes to about $20 billion value of, uh,
infrastructure.
That we have.
Now that long list of facilities includes Kennedy Space
Center in Florida, Johnson Space Center in Texas,
Stennis Space Center in Mississippi, Michoud Assembly Facility in Louisiana,
Ames Research Center in California,
and Wallops Flight Facility and NASA Langley right here in Virginia. We have.
Estimates that within the next 60 years or so that there could be
potential four feet rise in sea level.
And so therefore we are trying to take measures now.
Now in broad terms, that means moving to higher ground or, you know,
making facilities more resilient. At two of NASA's launch sites,
resiliency equals the movement of lots and lots of sand.
Um, for example, we have done some reconstruction work at Wallops, um,
and also at KSC where we have, um,
stabilized the shoreline and the dunes there.
And that's something that we have to, uh, replenish, uh,
approximately every five years.
So you have to wonder, is this something that would keep Calvin up at night?
Well, it is.
Yeah, at the top of our lists, uh,
definitely at the centers that are on the coastal areas. Uh,
we want to make sure that we are taking the necessary steps to ensure.
That, uh, in the future we have launch facilities,
research facilities that can continue the mission of NASA.
Now Calvin talked about the beach replenishment efforts at Wallops and Kennedy
Space Center. Um,
but I kind of wanted to dig a little deeper and find out what's happening at two
of NASA's research centers Ames on the West coast.
And of course I wanted to know what's happening here at Langley on the East
coast. Um, since I work at Langley, I knew exactly who to go to.
And that's Loretta Kelemen.
She is the director of Langley's Center Operations Directorate.
Certainly we are a, uh, a coastal, uh, center it's on the coast.
We're surrounded by two rivers, um, the, uh,
the York River and the James River and along with the Chesapeake Bay.
So a lot of opportunity for flooding and for sea level rise to present
itself as a problem, uh, for our center.
And so this is a big issue for us and certainly one we've been addressing for
some time. Now.
Conservative estimates show about a 15 inch rise in sea level at Langley by
2080, uh, more extreme estimates,
push that number as high as 49 inches or about four feet.
The center uses a flood tool as sort of a, I guess, like a crystal ball.
This tool, great tool developed by our geospatial information systems folks,
our GIS team, uh,
that allows us to visually picture the rising sea level and which facilities
and areas are affected.
In 2011,
following a study that highlighted some of Langley's biggest vulnerabilities,
the center,
which is actually NASA's oldest - it's just over a hundred years old now - began
taking action in the form of a major revitalization effort. Um,
this effort aims to shrink and consolidate Langley's campus and minimize those
vulnerabilities.
We've been demolishing facilities that are in highly vulnerable areas and
building all of our new facilities and consolidating a lot of our,
our missions into, uh, fewer facilities at our higher elevations. And,
and for us, uh, at NASA Langley, our higher elevation is around 12 foot.
And so we're not very high here. Further.
Complicating the issue at Langley is a phenomenon known as subsidence. Um,
the ground,
the center sits on is slowly sinking by about 2.2 millimeters a year.
Now,
if you add that to the 4.6 millimeters of sea level rise a year,
uh, let me do the math here.
You're actually getting about 6.8 millimeters of relative sea level
rise a year at Langley - currently. The center isn't taking any chances,
uh, they can't pack up and head for the mountains, of course,
but in addition to squeezing the campus onto the highest possible ground,
they're also making really smart construction choices.
The,
study that we did in 2011 of course recommended that when we build all of our
first floor elevations to 10 foot, six inch minimums,
and that goes into our design requirements for all of our new facilities.
For Loretta sea level rise, isn't just a work concern.
It's a personal concern too. Uh, she and her family live right on the water,
but the communities in Hampton roads are taking the issue seriously.
And the federal agencies are too. So she takes heart in that,
not just as a federal employee, but also as a private citizen.
I am I'm on the water. Always say,
I'm on the water or I'm in the water depending on the storm that day.
So you just never know. So it is a little personal and a little, um,
drives a little anxiety, but I'm very encouraged by, um,
certainly the work that the city of Hampton's doing. And I think, uh,
the things that they'll do, uh, will continue to support, uh,
and they're very engaged in the federal community here in Hampton.
And I think all the things that they're doing are going to help our center as
well to try to move water, move water out in a way, you know, from the,
from the city.
Okay.
So now we're going to move all the way across the country to Ames Research
Center, which is in Mountain View, California,
right in the heart of Silicon Valley at the southern end of the San Francisco
Bay. Now, when I reached out to Ames,
they put me in touch with a guy named Garrett Turner.
He is the restoration program manager in the Environmental Management Division
at Ames. And when Garrett thinks of sea level rise at Ames,
he thinks back to 1998 and a series of storms that moved through the area.
Now this gave officials at Ames a big scare because it flooded the north end of
the center and threatened to inundate a telecommunication gateway facility
there,
which actually would have shut down the internet for all of Silicon Valley.
We managed to keep that from happening by getting a lot of
employees, uh, both civil servants and contractors,
to go and put sandbags out.
And then we were able to pump some of the water in the channels
over a levee into Stevens Creek. Um, after that,
we kind of decided that we needed to have a proactive, uh,
way of at least addressing big storms.
Now much like Langley, um, Ames,
which is the second oldest NASA field center,
decided it needed to look to higher ground.
That decision was based on hundred year sea level rise projections.
We are now requiring a much higher minimum elevation
for a new facility that gets built.
So we have these little top up areas and our master plan has
envisioned taking facilities that are in that a hundred year flood,
plain and relocating them and relocating the entire campus
farther south,
which is several feet higher and has a
much lower expected impact from sea level rise.
There is a wrinkle here.
It's not just the bay that's a problem at Ames.
There's an old system of salt ponds and levees nearby that date back to the 19th
century. And they further complicate things.
And it's not a problem that Ames can just deal with on its own.
Levee maintenance is outside of NASA's property and we can't go
and fix all of these and keep them, uh,
from pouring water into, uh, into NASA.
One thing they're doing is working with the local water district.
We're working on trying to figure out how we can reinforce those
levees and potentially raise them that we have kind of
a bicycling and walking trail, the bay trail that goes around.
They'll have to look to their neighbors on either side for help too.
If we protect the levees immediately in front of us and they do nothing with
theirs,
we end up with the water just going over their levee and then coming in.
So this is going to have to be a partnership kind of regional with
other stakeholders to make sure that we can come up with a strategy that
works for all of us.
One of those strategies is actually to turn those old salt ponds into wetlands,
which would help slow the effects of sea level rise.
It would also be a return of sorts to what once was.
Civil engineers have it perfectly in the early 19 hundreds - we drained all the
swamps. Now we're creating wetlands.
It's kind of reversing what we did before.
So it's all part of the same training.
We've had a little change of scenery here.
Obviously I wanted to wrap things up on my front porch here in Hampton.
We're just a few blocks in from the water and we're on relatively high
ground. Still,
worst case longterm sea level rise projections would have me
sitting in the water here, um,
and even minor to moderate projections are pretty bad news for some folks right
here in this neighborhood, just a few miles across the water in Norfolk,
that way,
the high tide nuisance flooding I mentioned back at the beginning of this video,
um, is already encroaching regularly on urban areas and
frequently makes city streets a gamble for drivers in all,
but the tallest vehicles.
And so just as these coastal cities are having to deal with these wet realities,
so too is NASA. Uh,
when I set out to do this,
I really had very little idea what NASA was doing to deal with sea level
rise itself. Um,
now after talking to Calvin and Loretta and Garrett,
I realize that there's a lot going on. In some cases,
there are things that centers can do similarly,
like move facilities to higher ground to help,
but there's really no one size fits all approach.
Every place has its unique consideration.
Ames has the levees and salt ponds, Langley has subsidence,
uh, Kennedy, and Wallops have beach erosion to deal with.
Staying ahead of this stuff is obviously a big,
big job that requires a lot of expertise, foresight,
planning, and coordination. Thankfully,
it's a job that NASA is taking seriously. Um,
and it's a job that will allow NASA to continue its critical work in
space exploration and aeronautics and Earth science,
even as the water keeps rolling in.