2021-03-12
By Miriam Martinez,CITRIS Graphic Design Intern and Psychology Student, UC Merced class of 2023
Within the CITRIS Sustainable Infrastructures research thrust, the CITRIS Research Exchange featured new Assistant Professor in the department of Civil & Environmental Engineering Sam Markolf. Markolf originally an assistant research professor in Arizona State University before joining the UC Merced family 3 months ago. Professor Markolf presents his seminar called Toward Sustainable and Resilient Infrastructure Systems in the Anthropocene. Professor Markolf focuses on the idea of making future infrastructure resilient and sustainable by changing all the surrounding systems that affect it. As time progresses and society and cities change, we need to adapt infrastructure to change as well.
One of the main points that Professor Markolf makes is about the Anthropocene. He discusses it as the “age of humans” and how humanity has caused exponential changes in many of the systems around us. However, we are not prepared to battle against or adapt to the rapid changes. Our infrastructure is one of the victims of these changes. With a rapidly changing environment due to climate change and greenhouse gases, some buildings and infrastructure cannot adapt to the changes and face damage which place lives at risk.
A recent example are the buildings in Texas. Infrastructure in the arid southwest is built to survive heatwaves and hot summers—not snowstorms. When the 2021 winter storm stretched across Texas their buildings were not able to handle it. This caused homes to become dangerously cold and energy systems failed. This is not the fault of the creators of a lot of Texas infrastructure as the current method of preparing a building for an area is based on frequency-based design. This is where the frequency of a disaster happening such as heatwaves are taken into consideration, and thus, the infrastructure is built to adapt to that specific risk. According to Markolf, the approach, though, focuses on risk more implicitly, rather than explicitly.
As the last CITIRS Research Exchange of the spring semester, Professor Markolf’s presentation was deeply informative and fascinating to watch. If you are interested in this specific CITRIS Research Exchange, check it out on CITRIS’s YouTube channel. If you want more out of the CITRIS Research Exchange, you can register for future seminars and check out other events on the CITRIS events page.