Faculty Member Recognized for Efforts to Clean Up Underwater Junkyard
College Spotlight on Robin Sherman
When Robin Sherman launched the Florida Artificial Tire Reef Cleanup project a decade ago,she never envisioned that military divers would continue the habitat restoration project years later or that her work would earn a Coastal America Partnership Award and recognition from President Obama.
Sherman, Ph.D., associate professor and associate director of the Division of Math, Science, and Technology at the Farquhar College of Arts and Sciences, received the award on August 12, 2009, along with Richard Dodge, Ph.D., dean of the Nova Southeastern University Oceanographic Center.
In 1999, Sherman applied for funding from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) for a pilot project to examine how to clean up a “junkyard” of tires that had been placed in the Atlantic Ocean off Fort Lauderdale in the 1970s in an attempt to create an artificial reef and enhance the fish populations.After years of weathering currents and storms, the tires had become displaced and were damaging the natural reefs in the area. Some have made their way to shore. Others remain a threat to the fragile skeletal coral sculptures growing about the ocean floor.
“They were put in a shallow-water environment, only 70 feet deep, where currents and storm waves can move these tires,” Sherman said. “They weren’t anchored down. It didn’t take long for the artificial reef to break up and those tires to extend over a very large area.”
“My project was designed to function as a pilot project to look at how to go about this cleanup,” Sherman said. “The tires are physically damaging the coral reef. These are living animals. The reefs off Fort Lauderdale are mostly relic reefs. They’re left over from 7,000 to 10,000 years ago. There is still live coral on them. There are live sponges, invertebrates, fish, and turtles. It’s a living ecosystem that is being damaged by these tires.”
The pilot project, conducted by NSU’s Oceanographic Center and its National Coral Reef Institute (NCRI), determined the Osborne Reef tire removal and disposal project was important to protect the reefs.
In summer 2001, Sherman and volunteer divers spent eight days removing about 1,600 tires from the water.
“We cleared an area at the edge of the reef that was somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 by 50 feet,” Sherman said. “Part of my project was to monitor the site every three months for the next year to determine how mobile the tires were and how fast they moved. I went diving three months later and the area was completely covered again with tires. The reality set in. There were too many tires to remove them piecemeal. I made the report to the feds, and I said to them, ‘thank you, but...’”
Sherman thought that was the end of the project. But her early work helped convince the federal government in 2006 to continue the tire-removal project as a training mission for divers in various branches of the U.S. military.
The U.S. Navy has been deploying divers to the site each summer for a limited period of time. Using a barge and crane, military divers jump into the water, tie the tires together, and raise them to the surface. The tires are then recycled.
It gave [the military] an opportunity to put young divers in the water under supervision of experienced divers under moderately stressful conditions,” Sherman said. “They get training to do underwater work, and they remove the tires.”
“There is an inherent value in cleaning up the junkyard,” she said. “The reefs are an integral part of our community. South Florida and all of the Caribbean are communities built around tourism. That tourism exists because we live in a particularly spectacular environment. Any damage to the environment has other environmental, biological, ethical, and economic aspects to it.”
Sherman is no longer active in the project, but she is pleased that the clean-up continues.
“It’s incredibly exciting,” Sherman said. “It wasn’t something I thought I’d hear anything about when I finished my part of the project. I thought it was over at that point. I was so pleased to find out that it was moving forward and that the federal government was interested. That really feels good.”
