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>> Hello everyone, my name is Arisa.
I am a fourth-year
undergraduate geology student
at the Jackson School of Geosciences
at the University of Texas at Austin.
I am graduating this May
and I'll be moving into the
energy industry, and hopefully,
be pursuing a graduate study
in marine geology afterwards.
Geologic hazards affect
people's life directly
whether it be an earthquake,
a tsunami, or a landslide.
Many geoscientists are
interested in how these hazards
can shape the earth, as well
as possible hazard predictions.
In 2017, Hurricane Harvey
hit the Texas coast
as a Category Four hurricane.
Hurricane Harvey is known
for its catastrophic flood,
but it also impacted so much
of the shoreline's shape
through sediments or sand transport.
My research project looks
at how the flow of water,
due to the hurricane,
generated deeply scarred
channels on the beach.
If you know where the big
changes in the beach could be
and how they form,
we can help guide projects
such as beach nourishment,
making our coastlines and
people's lives more resilient
to hurricanes over time.
Here are aerial photographs
of San Jose Island,
which is the barrier island
just north of Mustang Island in Texas.
The left side is before Harvey.
The beach was pristine.
The right side is after Harvey.
You can see that these many long channels
lying perpendicularly to the
shoreline just popped right up.
The offshore wind held the
water inside the bay up,
allowing it to flow into the ocean,
carving out all of these
erosional features.
We went down to look at them closely
and I took measurements in the channels
and found that the water has transported
so much sand out of the beach
that it would take quite a
while for the beach to recover.
The modeling results show
that we can tell locations
that are most susceptible to erosion
and where the channels
would be forming in 2017,
just based on the pre-storm
topography data alone,
which is really exciting.
I grew up in Bangkok, Thailand,
and my family wanted me to study medicine,
but I did not want to.
I've always been interested in science
and so, in my last year of high school,
I went to geoscience
camps to check 'em out,
and we identified rocks, used compass,
and learned how to think
like geoscientists.
At one camp,
our team of four walked
a part of a mountain
and came up with a geologic map,
and that was my first geologic map.
I was so fascinated by
the sense of discovery
and the teamwork aspect of the discipline,
and I decided to pursue
geology in college.
In Thailand, geology
is not a famous field.
Most of my friends end up
pursuing medicine or engineering.
It was not all easy to break
away from the cultural norms,
but I'm really glad that I did it.
If something speaks to you and
you have done your research,
you should be your number one cheerleader
to pursue what you think is best.
Last December, I had an
opportunity to present my project
at the American Geophysical
Union Fall Meeting
in Washington, D.C.,
which is the largest annual
earth sciences gathering
in the world.
Throughout the week, I got
to talk to many geoscientists
and got me even more
excited on the project.
This research project also won
the best undergraduate poster award
for the Jackson School
of Geosciences symposium.
Moving forward, I'll be
giving an oral presentation
on the project in Vienna, Austria
during the European Geosciences
Union General Assembly.
College is about putting
what you believe into action.
It's not going to be all easy,
but you gain such appreciation
from overcoming each obstacle,
and I wish everyone good luck.
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