News

Initial Funding Awarded to the Texas A&M University at Galveston Gulf Center for Sea Turtle Research

Dr. Christopher Marshall was awarded a state wildlife grant for TPWD, Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, to tag turtles in Galveston Bay. The Gulf Center for Sea Turtle Research team plan to attach satellite and acoustic tags turtles in the bay and coastal areas to study population demographics, movements in the system, and habitat needs and uses.

NSF Research team is studying Hurricane Risk Predication in a Changing Climate

Texas A&M and Texas A&M Galveston researchers will be part of a team using historical and long-term reconstructions of hurricane activity in the western North Atlantic to ultimately improve hurricane preparedness and resilience.

Led by Dr. Jeffrey Donnelly of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, the team includes leading researchers in hurricanes, flooding, and coastal geomorphology. Dr. Kerry Emanuel of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dr. Kristopher Karnauskas of the University of Colorado Boulder, Dr. Ning Lin of Princeton University; Dr. Robert Korty, associate professor in the Department of Atmospheric Sciences at Texas A&M University; and Dr. Peter van Hengstum, associate professor in the Department of Marine Sciences at Texas A&M University at Galveston, who holds a joint appointment in the Texas A&M Department of Oceanography, make up the research team.

See some quotes from the article below.

“Changes to hurricane activity in the coming century have the potential to substantially impact the entire economic landscape of American coastal regions,” Korty said. “We know that storms in a warming climate carry increased risks of flooding in a general sense, but our ability to predict how quickly these hazards are changing has been hampered by an incomplete understanding of how variability in ocean circulations interacts with the changing climate.”

“Blue holes are collapsed caves that create a perfect trap for sediments in the coastal zone,” Van Hengstum said. “Hurricane passage deposits a distinct sand layer in the blue hole, so the sediments preserved at the bottom of blue holes preserve a library of hurricane events not recorded in any other way."