Hundreds of miles away on the shores of Cape Cod, graduate students from various universities study sand dunes while Patrick Hesp, geography and anthropology professor and coastal geomorphologist, heads the research from his office at LSU.
Hesp has been leading research on sand dunes, dealing mainly with blowouts. Hesp explained that a blowout forms when wind blows out some of the sand on the surface of a dune, leaving a crater-like shape.
Hesp said he is not yet sure how to prevent the occurrence of blowouts, which can make a dune unstable, but so far he has found that they occur when the climate becomes drier and plants begin to suffer.
“Were it to become drier or windier, even if it were seasonal, we may see more of the blowouts,” Hesp said.
He added that some blowouts can be up to one kilometer long.
Hesp started a photo analysis in 2004 when he took a picture of a patch of sand that was not vegetated, and a blowout had already started to form. When he took another picture of the same spot of land three years later, the blowout was much larger.
“We’ve been stunned by the rate of speed by which things have changed,” Hesp said.
Hesp said the work in Cape Cod can relate to Louisiana, where sand dunes in the barrier islands of the state are a big part of protecting the coast.
Though the sand dune systems in other parts of the world outweigh Louisiana’s sand dune systems in size, hurricanes and climate change still affect the state’s dunes, he said.
“If we found out how [the Cape Cod] system worked, some of that knowledge could be applied to the barrier islands in Louisiana,” Hesp said.
Barry Keim, geography and anthropology professor and state climatologist, said while the scientific community does not understand the climate system well enough to figure out the cause of global warming, humans should work to clean up the atmosphere and try to lessen their dependency on fossil fuels.
“It’s probably some combination of both, but the fact is we really don’t know how much is natural and how much is anthropogenic,” Keim said.
