Abdullah AlManayes
Nothing here was written to prove a point. If there is one, I hope it becomes obvious on its own.
Designing for a Changing Environment
A visit to the Montauk Lighthouse reveals how looking across centuries can change the way we understand environmental change and the way engineers design for it.
Montauk Point Lighthouse, New York
When I visited the Montauk Lighthouse Museum, dioramas of the landscape and lighthouse were displayed, spanning several centuries. Individually, each diorama simply showed what Montauk looked like at a certain point in time. But as I viewed them in chronological order, something else became apparent. The lighthouse remained in place, while the coastline surrounding it continued to change.
The Montauk Lighthouse was built in 1796, but coastal erosion has gradually brought the edge of the land closer to the lighthouse. Engineers have since constructed a stone revetment along the coastline, where large rocks absorb the energy of incoming waves and reduce further erosion.
What interested me was how the timeframe changed what I was able to see. Changes to an environment can be gradual and difficult to recognize over a few years. But when the timeframe expands to decades, or even centuries, smaller changes accumulate into a much clearer trend. This is especially important with environmental problems like coastal erosion, rising sea levels, and changes to ecosystems.
It also changed how I thought about environmental engineering. Engineers aren’t only designing for the environment that exists today. Looking at how an environment has changed over a larger timeframe can indicate how it may continue to change, and what we build has to account for that.
The individual dioramas showed what Montauk looked like at a certain time. Collectively, they showed something more important: how much it had changed.