Georgia Tech is focused on understanding climate change and the long-term behavior of global climate systems, as well as their impact on human and environmental health. At the intersection of scientific disciplines and engineering principles, we work to address emerging environmental issues — from sustaining our air, water, and land resources to public health and environmental restoration.
Environment
Professor Nga Lee “Sally” Ng is using a $12 million grant from the National Science Foundation to build a network of instruments that will characterize the properties of aerosols, which have significant effects on health and climate change.
A 30-pound spacecraft known as the Lunar Flashlight was assembled and tested at Georgia Tech. It will use powerful lasers and an onboard spectrometer to search shaded areas of craters at the lunar south pole for evidence of surface ice.
The Coastal Equity and Resilience Hub, in its fourth year, is now slated to receive $5 million from Congress. It is secured by U.S. Sens. Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, and U.S. Rep. Earl L. “Buddy” Carter to expand the network of sensors — currently 50 are deployed off Chatham County’s coast — to blanket Georgia’s 11-county coastal region.
A study, published in Nature Communications with co-authors from Newcastle and Lancaster universities and the Georgia Institute of Technology, shows that lake volume varied year-to-year by as much as 200% on individual ice shelves (floating extensions of the main Antarctic ice sheet), and by around 72% overall.
A new study from two researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology provides both hope and a potentially grim future for damaged coral reefs. In their research paper, "Biodiversity has a positive but saturating effect on imperiled coral reefs," published Oct. 13 in Science Advances, Cody Clements and Mark Hay found that increasing coral richness by ‘outplanting’ a diverse group of coral species together improves coral growth and survivorship.
Joe Bozeman has published a framework and 10-step process to help engineers, scientists, and community members standardize their data related to energy and environmental topics. The goal is to integrate equity into these fields, a practice Bozeman and his colleagues call systemic equity. By doing so, they hope to create a system that includes more demographic groups, such as age, income, race, and ethnicity.