Nicholls State University will receive nearly 500 thousand dollars in grant money that will go towards coastal research. Fines and penalties from the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill are providing the funding for the grant dollars. Nicholls Dean of Sciences and Technology Dr. John Doucet said they will specifically look at how coastal ridges can help in the fight against land loss.
“So whenever a bayou or a river deposits its settlement it creates ultimately a couple of levees and ridges and communities have built themselves over the course of hundreds of years on those ridges,” Doucet said.
Nicholls will also assist with the creation of ridges to protect back marshes by studying naturally occurring ones. Doucet said these artificial ridges will protect the back marsh and trap sediment.
“Our job at Nicholls is to assess those constructs and to compare them to naturally occurring ridges to see how to make them better and prevent their deterioration,” Doucet said.
Nicholls’s proposal was one of eight projects selected from a pool of 20 submissions and is the first time the University researchers have received Restore Act money. Doucet said this is just one of many coastal restoration projects the university has undertaken.
“We have an incredible history and I think that history together with the good highly regarded scientists addressing coastal issues at the university or what was largely responsible for developing these ideas,” Doucet said.
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