 There is no way to stop the sea from rising at this point even if we mitigate the amount of CO2 we emit We can blunt the impact of sea level rise. We can keep it below a maximum, but it's coming Most communities are thinking about levees as a way to keep the ocean from moving sideways onto the land But even if you build a levee or a seawall the groundwater is going to come up behind it as the groundwater rises It's going to move those contaminants around We made the first map of the depth to groundwater for the whole bay area So the blue areas are all the places where groundwater is pretty shallow Down about 10 feet the black dots represent contaminated sites And there are more than 8,000 around the whole bay area These red circles are all places where they found contaminants And these are the flow lines that those contaminants would flow along if they're mobilized by higher groundwater This water is going to go either to a creek or a wetland or the bay or the groundwater And that's why it's so important to clean it because it's going to go somewhere That we care about I think there's something Really beautiful about making land usable again and safe and healthy A lot of the sites were once really productive and really important Trying to find creative ways to continue their legacy but in a healthier way It seems really exciting One of the things that I enjoy about showing this information to students is that we talk about the contaminants and What kinds of illnesses they cause and that's very dark and kind of difficult Work But then we talk about how if we did remove those contaminants We could live with higher water in a way that's actually beautiful The contamination in this area is really the legacy of the former industrial operations that happen along the east bay shoreline So we did a large soil remediation with mercury contamination And we also did a large pcb removal and now we have you know a 10-year-old mature marsh We have endangered witch-raised whales living here. They're breeding. They're reproducing And I think the university's done a really great job of making that happen We shared our research with the city of Alameda From that point they started making plans to actually use floating housing And you do that by digging artificial ponds and expose the groundwater And then you put in houses on floating decking The collaboration with uc-berkeley has helped us to better understand the risks that we face from seal arise and to help us identify some creative solutions We have to really be prepared to live with higher water because we tend to think oh 2050 by then I'll be whatever and I won't care But in fact, of course our children their children are all going to be here