This is scientific American 60 second science. I'm Christopher Intagiyata.

A physics lesson may be the last thing on your mind as you relax at the ocean.

However, if you're sitting on a lovely Hawaiian beach with your my tie and you're looking offshore and you see 20 foot waves and people surfing on them and you notice that it's only lapping up on the shoreline here with teeny little

waves, that's the reef working to dissipate that energy.

Mike Beck studies the intersection of engineering, ecology, economics, and finance at

UC Santa Cruz, and he says reefs act a whole lot like our human-built coastal infrastructure

to tame the energy of incoming waves. They essentially act just like a low crested submerged breakwater.

That's an engineering term, but it means that there are really good engineering models

for describing the benefits of reefs.

And those models are the key behind a new report from the US Geological Survey,

with Beck as one of its authors.

The researchers modeled hypothetical storms hitting coastlines in areas with offshore reefs, like Florida, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico.

They studied how reefs of various heights would dampen waves and hold back flooding.

And they found that every year, the country's reefs save the US an estimated

1.8 billion dollars in direct flooding damages and other economic losses.

That dollar number is important because it allows reef-free building projects, like gluing little

healthy coral nubins on damaged reefs, to tap into billions of dollars of federal money

set aside for hurricane and disaster resilience.

If you can rigorously value the benefits of any of these habitats, you can unlock any of the funding

mechanisms that would have typically been applied to

developing a sea wall or a breakwater.

That's a win-win for life below the water and for those of us who live on land as well.

...