Another summer brings another underrepresented minority undergraduate internship to the South Central Climate Science Center’s consortium member universities. This year’s ten highly qualified and energetic students began their three-week internship down on the Louisiana coast. Kicking things off with faculty, staff, and students at LSU; the interns visited several facilities and sites to get first-hand exposure to some of the climate related issues the LA coast faces.

The LSU based portion of the internship involved a trip to the Louisiana Marine Consortium (LUMCON), where the interns visited barrier islands off the LA coast and explored and took sediment samples from the salt marshes of Cocodrie. The group toured the Atchafalaya Basin by boat, guided by the staff of the LA Nature Conservancy. The interns concluded their time in LA with a tour of New Orleans where they visited areas still scarred from the damage wrought by Hurricane Katrina and the failure of critical levy structures in its wake.

The group now carries on their experience in Oklahoma, and finally Texas, where they’ll go from seeing what problems arise with too much water in LA, to those that come with too little in Oklahoma and Texas.