NASA Is Facing a Climate Change Countdown

Note the last paragraph in this story:  The storms will come.  Like NASA, let's get smart and resilient.  

NASA Is Facing a Climate
Change Countdown

Kennedy Space Center and other NASA facilities near
coastlines are facing the prospect of continually rising waters.

By JOHN SCHWARTZ 

KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla. — The concrete block perches absurdly atop a piling, elevated about 10 feet above the beach sand. Is it art? A bulky milepost?Carlton Hall pointed to the puzzling object and explained that it was once a tie-down block for securing structures like antenna towers. 

Dr. Hall, the chief scientist for the space center’s ecological program, said that when he started working here a few decades ago, the block had been buried. 

Now the sand that enveloped it is gone, swept away by the forces of coastal erosion and storms.  He gestured toward the waves rolling in nearby and said, “The beach used to be at least 50 yards out.”On the other side of the dunes, a quarter mile away, sit two artificial hills some 50 feet high. Those are NASA’s two biggest launchpads. And to the south sit several smaller ones. 

The space center is about a quarter-mile from the Atlantic Ocean, and rising water is eroding the beach. Credit Melissa Lyttle for The New York Time This is America’s busiest spaceport, and the water is coming.Like so much of Florida, the Space Coast — a 72-mile stretch along the Atlantic — is feeling the threat of climate change. Some of the erosion is caused by the churning energy of ocean currents along the coastline. Hurricane Sandy, whose power was almost certainly strengthened by climate change, took a big bite in 2012, flattening an already damaged dune line that provided protection from the Atlantic’s battering.A rising sea level will bring even greater risk over time — and perhaps sooner than most researchers expected. According to a study published last week, warming pressure on the Antarctic ice sheet could help push sea levels higher by as much as five or six feet by the end of this century.  NASA isn’t just a victim of climate change. It contributes to climate science in many ways, and not only in the data from the many satellites that orbit the planet after leaving Earth from here.

Its astronauts also help build awareness of the growing urgency of climate change. Astronaut Scott Kelly, who recently returned from nearly a year in space, took hundreds of photographs that could seem like abstract art or a dire warning; in an email interview just before his descent, he said that he had seen changes in the planet even since his previous mission in 2010.

“It seems to me there is more pollution in India and China than what I saw last time,” he said. “Definitely noticed the fires this summer in the U.S.A.; sometimes, could see the smoke all the way to Chicago.”

“Weather systems where they are not supposed to be obvious,” he added. “The fragility of the atmosphere always apparent.”

Pondering the Problem

NASA, which has at least $32 billion worth of structures and facilities around the country, has been considering the possible effects of climate change for nearly a decade, said Kim W. Toufectis, a strategist who leads the master planning program for the space agency.

NASA, after all, is in the business of risk management. By 2007, “we had to acknowledge that we should recognize climate change and extreme weather as a formal risk that we should be actually managing,” Mr. Toufectis said.

With all of its expertise and its ability to make forecasts based on data, Mr. Toufectis added, “shame on us if we are not capitalizing on that.”

In fact, NASA’s climate risk extends far beyond Florida. About two-thirds of the land that NASA manages is within 16 feet of mean sea level, and much of it is near the coasts. “We are tremendously linked to the drink,” Mr. Toufectis said.

Johnson Space Center in Texas sits by Clear Lake, an inlet of Galveston Bay and the Gulf of Mexico. The surge from Hurricane Ike in 2008 caused power failures and debris pileup that shut down the center for a week.

The Michoud Assembly Plant, which built the enormous orange tanks used by the space shuttle, sits at the eastern end of New Orleans, and narrowly missed being inundated in Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Ames Research Center is near San Francisco Bay.

The agency’s Climate Adaptation Science Investigators working group, which evaluates risks for all federal agencies, has predicted that sea level rise of five inches to more than two feet by 2050 could cause widespread problems for the five coastal NASA sites.

Coastal floods that might now occur once every 10 years could happen twice as often at Johnson, twice to three times as often at Kennedy and 10 times more often at Ames.

“NASA coastal centers that are already at risk of flooding are virtually certain to become more vulnerable in the future,” the working group wrote in a 2014 report.

The agency brought together the managers for each center to learn directly from NASA scientists about climate change risks. They took field trips to the vulnerable areas in 2009.

“It became very real,” said Cynthia E. Rosenzweig, senior research scientist at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, and an author of the 2014 report.

At Kennedy Space Center, of course, the elements are always a challenge. The air off the sea attacks delicate equipment and rusts structures. Hurricanes occasionally come through, as well. In 2004, Hurricane Frances tore hundreds of siding panels off the gargantuan Vehicle Assembly Building, requiring extensive repairs. Storms in 2007 and 2008 battered the shore.

Then in 2012, Hurricane Sandy sent a surge that hit the coast like a scouring pad, leveling about a mile of dune protection and leaving the landscape stretching toward the launchpads covered with sand.

Already, NASA has spent much of a $3 million appropriation to rebuild a long dune to replace protective sands that have been washed away.

NASA sits in the middle of a vast wildlife refuge, so replacing the dunes was a more delicate job than simply sending in bulldozers and piling up dirt.

Those doing the work had to be considerate of the wildlife, like the endangered gopher tortoise, with its high-domed shell.

The sand that NASA brought in had to resemble the sand that had been washed away, so the tortoises would be comfortable rebuilding burrows and sea turtles would be able to return to the site to nest. Workers took cuttings of plants from the old dunes, grew them and put in 180,000 individual plants to secure the new dunes. Now they are growing thick with grasses, sea oats, purple-flowered railroad vine and palmetto.

The Storms to Come

No one doubts, however, that more storms will come, and the warmer air and water brought by climate change are likely to lead to more destructive storms.