Miami’s Morningside Park offers visitors front-row seats to the beauty of Biscayne Bay. In spring 2025, the park will be home to a cool new idea in the fight against climate change and making a better life for sea creatures. It’s a new technology called BIOCAP tiles, beautiful 3D-printed slabs of concrete shaped like coral reefs.
These tiles were created by researchers from my alma mater, Florida International University, and they are more than just decorative recreations of coral reefs. BIOCAP, which stands for Biodiversity Improvement by Optimizing Coastal Adaptation and Performance, serves a dual purpose of housing local marine life and fighting climate change.
Traditional seawalls can ultimately end up doing more harm than good. Their existence is actively hostile toward sea life by disrupting the way shorelines naturally function. They also lack the nooks and crannies that marine organisms call home.
Miami’s Experimental New Seawalls Are Beautiful 3D-Printed Coral Reefs That Fight Climate Change
Each BIOCAP tile is packed with grooves, pockets, and crevices that sea creatures like oysters and barnacles can squeeze themselves into or cling onto just as they would in a naturally occurring coral reef. Giving them even more space to nestle within allows creatures like oysters to do their work cleaning our oceans, as oysters filter around 50 gallons of water a day.
Cleaner oceans mean healthier seagrass, which means more plant life that captures carbon and produces oxygen, benefiting us and ocean life.
These tiles aren’t just mollusk condos. Their odd, irregular shapes are inspired by actual coral reefs found in nature, helping break up wave energy in a way that mimics the effects of a natural shoreline. Instead of smacking into a flat wall that creates a big splash, the waves hit a curvy, swirly set of obstacles that channel the water in different directions, thereby softening the blow and redirecting waves away from the seawall to minimize erosion.
The pilot project, which is being funded by the EPA and NSF, is rigged with sensors. They measure everything from wave pressure to pH levels, and nearby cameras will monitor sea life populations that move into their fancy new concrete digs.
If the tiles work as intended, all sorts of ocean critters are going to suddenly find themselves overburdened by an astronomical number of new potential homes they could choose to live in.
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