On October 10, In 2018, Tyndall Air Force Base in the Gulf of Mexico, a pillar of American air superiority, found itself under air attack. Hurricane Michael, first spotted as a Category 2 storm off the coast of Florida, unexpectedly strengthened to a Category 5. Sustained winds of 155 mph blew on base, tossing utility poles, knocking down F-22s and totaling more than 200 buildings. . The only saving grace: Despite being located on a peninsula, Tyndall avoided flood damage. Michael’s 9 to 14 foot storm surge flooded other areas of Florida. Tyndall’s main defense was luck.
The $5 billion Tyndall disaster was just one of many extreme weather events that convinced the U.S. Department of Defense it needed new ideas to protect the country’s 1,700 bases coastal areas for which he is responsible on a global scale. As Hurricanes Helene and Milton have just shown, beach dwellers face increasing threats from climate change, and the Pentagon is no exception. The rise of the oceans is eating away at the shores. Stronger storms are more likely to flood land.
In response, Tyndall later this month will test a new way to protect shorelines from intensifying waves and storm surges: a prototype artificial reef, designed by a team led by Rutgers University scientists. The 50-meter-wide network, made up of three chevron-shaped structures each weighing approximately 46,000 pounds, can absorb 70 percent of the punch out of the waves, according to tests. But this isn’t your grandfather’s dike. It is specially designed to be colonized by oysters, some of nature’s most effective wave killers.
If researchers can optimize these creatures to work in tandem with new artificial structures placed at sea, they believe the resulting barriers could extract 90 percent of the waves’ energy. David Bushek, who directs the Haskin Shellfish Research Lab at Rutgers, swears he’s not hoping for a megastorm to show his team’s unity. But he is not not hoping for one. “Models are always imperfect. They’re always a replica of something,” he says. “They’re not the real ones.”
The project is one of three being developed under a $67.6 million program launched by the U.S. government’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or Darpa. Cheekily called Reefense, the initiative is the Pentagon’s effort to test whether “hybrid” reefs, combining artificial structures with oysters or corals, can work as well as a good old sea wall. Darpa has chosen three research teams in 2022, all led by American universities. After two years of intensive research and development, their prototypes are starting to hit the water, the first being Rutgers.
Today, the Pentagon protects its coastal assets just like civilians do: by hardening them. Common approaches include armoring the shoreline with retaining walls or arranging heavy objects, such as rocks or concrete blocks, in long rows. But landscaping structures come with compromises. They deflect rather than absorb wave energy, so protecting your own coastline means exposing someone else’s. They are also static: as sea levels rise and storms intensify, it is increasingly easier for water to overcome these structures. This wears them out more quickly and requires constant and expensive repairs.