On October 10, In 2018, Tyndall Air Force Base in the Gulf of Mexico, a pillar of American air superiority, came under air attack. Hurricane Michael, first seen as a Category 2 storm off the coast of Florida, unexpectedly upgraded to a Category 5. Sustained winds of 155 miles per hour battered the base, toppling power poles, upending F-22 aircraft and destroying a total of 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 parts of Florida. Tyndall’s main defense was luck.
That $5 billion disaster at Tyndall was just one of a growing number of extreme weather events that convinced the U.S. Department of Defense that it needed new ideas to protect the 1,700 coastal bases for which it is responsible worldwide. As hurricanes Helene and Milton just demonstrated, beachfront residents face threats compounded by climate change, and the Pentagon is no exception. Rising oceans are devouring the coast. Stronger storms are more capable of flooding land.
In response, Tyndall later this month will test a new way to protect shorelines from intensified waves and storm surge: a prototype artificial reef, designed by a team led by scientists at Rutgers University. The 50-meter-wide array, composed of three chevron-shaped structures each weighing about 46,000 pounds, can support 70 percent of the sexual attraction out of the waves, according to the tests. But this is not your grandfather’s boardwalk. It is specifically designed to be colonized by oysters, some of nature’s most effective wave killers.
If researchers can optimize these creatures to work in conjunction with new artificial structures placed in the sea, they believe the resulting barriers can absorb 90 percent of wave energy. David Bushek, who directs the Haskin Shellfish Research Laboratory at Rutgers, swears he’s not waiting for a megastorm to come along and show what his team’s unity is made of. but he is not No waiting for one. “Models are always imperfect. They are always a replica of something,” he says. “They’re not real.”
The project is one of three being developed within the framework of a $67.6 million program launched by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) of the United States government. Cheekily called Reefense, the initiative is the Pentagon’s effort to test whether “hybrid” reefs, which combine artificial structures with oysters or coral, can work as well as a good sea wall. Darpa has chosen three research teams, all led by American universities, in 2022. After two years of intense research and development, their prototypes are beginning to hit the water, the first being at Rutgers.
Today, the Pentagon protects its coastal assets the same way civilians do: by hardening them. The most common approaches involve shielding the shoreline with retaining walls or arranging heavy objects, such as rocks or concrete blocks, in long rows. But strong structures come with trade-offs. They divert wave energy rather than absorbing it, so protecting your own coast means exposing someone else’s. They are also static: as sea levels rise and storms become stronger, it is easier for water to overcome these structures. This wears them out more quickly and requires constant, expensive repairs.
